Balkan Triage

© Laurence B. Winn

May 1, 1999

It is not possible to see pictures of ethnic Albanians deposited on their neighbor's borders by the trainload without remembering the Jewish Holocaust. The language, the tools, and the goals certainly appear to be the same. The news from the Balkans is full of "ethnic cleansing", villages emptied of inhabitants, mass graves, and, of course, the railroad cars. Like Poland in 1939.

In Slobodan Milosevic, are we seeing a reprise of Adolph Hitler? Are we going to hear further justifications for genocide aimed at those rotten Bogomil heretics who sold out to the Turks after Serbia's defeat at Kosovo ... in 1389? Mad, pernicious tyrants who also happen to be charismatic leaders have persuaded ordinary men to commit unspeakable acts over and over again, and for the same lame reasons. How? Perhaps it is a pure act of zero-sum gamesmanship, as Richard L. Rubenstein argues in his remarkable little book The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Over-Crowded World (Beacon Press, 1983).

An acute economic crisis admits only two solutions, according to Rubenstein (he later proposes a third, but we'll get to that): the redistribution of wealth (socialism, for example) or the elimination of the surplus population. The thought of G.W.F. Hegel, who wrote at a time when emigration was what "elimination" might be taken to mean, is a philosophical mainstay of Rubenstein's thesis. Hegel doubted the utility of welfare assistance, with or without a work requirement. He saw no solution to an excess of people except emigration.

"Civil Society," he wrote in Philosophy of Right, is thus driven to found colonies. Increase in population alone has this effect, but it is due in particular to the appearance of a number of people who cannot secure the satisfaction of their own needs by their own labor once production rises above the requirements of consumers."

Hegel failed to consider the possibility that territories available for colonization might vanish. That is where Rubenstein picks up the thread.

"The wars of this century," he says, "can be seen as a continuation of population elimination." One could site as examples the genocidal elimination of Armenians from Turkey in the War to End All Wars, Jews from Europe in the war after that, and ethnic Chinese from Indochina after the Vietnam campaigns.

Rubenstein's statement that "Within the logic of triage, there is nothing sacred about human life" must be posted on the walls of the world's Departments of State, to judge by their behavior. However, Rubenstein suggests another explanation:

"In previous decades of this century, mass warfare provided an effective means of killing off the population surplus. This 'solution' is no longer realistically available because of the unpredictable hazards of nuclear war. In a crisis, government leaders are likely to prefer controlled methods of eliminating surplus people to the imponderables of nuclear conflict."

Supposing that an American population elimination plan must, of necessity, be Draconian, Rubenstein proposes an alternative "religious consensus", the foundation of a new, unifying religion to replace all others. It would offer an ethic of equilibrium and mutual assistance in the absence of competition. In brief, change Man.

How likely is that?

It is possible to admire Rubenstein's Triage while disagreeing with his conclusion. Indeed, he has diagnosed our collective problem skillfully and correctly, but his patterns of thought are two-dimensional. He throws out the only possible alternative to social collapse, reproductive failure and wholesale murder - that of unending growth and unending movement.