Matt Schissler Face of Buddhist Terror” is only one example.21 International organizations dedicated to monitoring human rights and identifying potential for genocide and mass violence have begun issuing warnings. “These elements are ingredients for potential catastrophic violence in the future, including potential crimes against humanity and/or genocide,” warned Physicians for Human Rights in August 2013. “If left unchecked, this particular combination could lead to mass atrocities on a scale heretofore unseen in Burma.”22 Meanwhile, after a visit in February 2014, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Myanmar concluded that this violence, “if left unaddressed, could jeopardize the entire reform process.”23 At what point do these ingredients combine and combust – or, do they not? The fiery anti-Muslim rhetoric that has attracted international attention is concerning – but when does it give way to actual violence? Scholars studying mass atrocity have long wrestled with such questions, both in retrospective attempts to understand why history’s horrors came to take place and to develop monitoring tools so that they never again happen again. This broad literature base employs a variety of approaches, focusing on material and political conditions as well as the ideas that can enable or drive such violence. While it is not the purpose of this paper to comment on these myriad approaches, it is axiomatic that, to some degree, without ideational justification violence on a mass scale is not possible. Jonathan Leader Maynard at Oxford University summarized the literature establishing this axiom, to more clearly apply the broad concept of ideology to understanding how atrocities occur. In doing so, Maynard places special importance on how atrocities are justified – how those who give orders to kill, those who kill, and those who otherwise participate or stand aside are motivated to do so, and how doing so is legitimated and rationalised.24 For Maynard, understanding how large numbers of people may be mobilized to enact violence hinges on the central questions of how atrocity-justifying arguments are communicated, and how they are found to be persuasive.25 The question of how and why particular arguments are persuasive is an old one, as important now as it was for classical rhetoricians like Aristotle. For Aristotle, one of the (three) most important modes of persuasion was ethos, referring to the authority or credibility of a given speaker. Taken to an extreme degree, this is “epistemic dependence,” the tendency to depend on authorities in their various fields to determine what is true. This is a kind of societal division of labour, a process that leads one to, for example, accept that smoking cigarettes causes cancer without grasping the full details of medical science.26 This also helps to explain why large groups of people sometimes adopt views that appear absurd to another audience. Not out of some kind of psychosis, primitive ignorance or susceptibility to brainwashing, but as the result that logically follows from relying exclusively on information from one set of authorities. German scholar Michael Baurmann calls this “epistemic seclusion.”27 Sunstein might call it an echo chamber. Maynard demonstrates the core role this plays in enabling mass violence. 21 Beech, “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” Physicians for Human Rights, Patterns of Anti-Muslim Violence in Burma: A Call for Accountability and Prevention, August 2013, 2. 23 Tomás Ojea Quintana, Statement of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Myanmar, Endof-mission statement by the Special Rapporteur (Yangon, Myanmar, February 19, 2014), http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14263&LangID=E. 24 Jonathan Leader Maynard, “Rethinking the Role of Ideology in Mass Atrocities,” Terrorism and Political Violence 0, no. 0 (0): 1–2, doi:10.1080/09546553.2013.796934. 25 Leader Maynard, “Rethinking the Role of Ideology in Mass Atrocities.” 26 John Hardwig, “Epistemic Dependence,” Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 7 (1985): 335–49. 27 Michael. Baurmann, “Rational Fundamentalism? An Explanatory Model of Fundamentalist Beliefs,” Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology 4, no. 2 (2007): 150–66, doi:10.1353/epi.2007.0016. 22 6/13