Since my previous work had neglected the extremes of human behavior, I had not thought much about good and evil. Like most people, I had tended to keep them in entirely separate categories from each other as well as from ordinary life. Having studied ethnic cleansing, I am now not so sure. Though I am not attempting here to morally blur good and evil, in the real world they are connected. Evil does not arrive from outside of our civilization, from a separate realm we are tempted to call “primitive.” Evil is generated by civilization itself.

Consider the words of three prominent historical figures. We tend to think of President Thomas Jefferson as embodying Enlightened reason. Indeed, it was in the name of the advance of civilization that he declared that the “barbarities” of the native American Indians “justified extermination.” A century later, President Theodore Roosevelt, a decent modern man, agreed, saying of the Indians, “extermination was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable.” Forty years on, a third leader said, “It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life.” This was SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, who is rightly considered as the personification of evil. Yet he and his colleague Adolf Hitler said they were only following in the Americans' footsteps. As I will argue here, murderous ethnic cleansing has been a central problem of our civilization, our modernity, our conceptions of progress, and our attempts to introduce democracy.