section_path: Causes and perpetration
section_name: Causes and perpetration
paragraph_text: Causes and perpetration
  
  We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty: but that was utterly impossible in view of the fact that those who are innocent today might be guilty tomorrow. The concern for the safety of Turkey simply had to silence all other concerns.
  
  — Talaat Pasha in Berliner Tageblatt, 4 May 1916
  
  Genocide is not an end of itself, but a means to another end—often chosen by perpetrators after other options failed. Moses argues that security—particularly the quest for absolute security informed by paranoia—is the underlying rationale behind all atrocity crimes, including genocide. Genocide perpetrators harm noncombatants along with combatants because of the collective guilt ascribed to an entire people—defined according to race but targeted because of its supposed security threat. Likewise, Jonathan Leader Maynard argues that "mass killings are strategies to achieve familiar security-centric aims, such as defeating perceived enemies, upholding regimes, policing societies, and winning wars", but argues that ideological factors are necessary to explain why such atrocities seem to be a desirable solution to the identified security problem. When exaggerations of the threat are combined with such rationales as military necessity, defense against aggression, and national security, people can be induced to support extreme atrocities. Other motives for genocide have included theft, land grabbing, and revenge.
  
  A large proportion of genocides occurred under the course of imperial expansion and power consolidation. The organizer of genocide is often assumed to be a centralized totalitarian government. While genocides are often carried out by states and military forces, in many cases, paramilitaries and other decentralized forces are involved. In response to greater international scrutiny of genocide, state-sponsored atrocities can be carried out in secrecy by paramilitary groups that are offered impunity for their crimes. This offers the benefit of plausible deniability while widening complicity in the atrocities. Although genocide is typically organized around pre-existing identity boundaries, it has the outcome of strengthening them. Although many scholars have emphasized the role of ideology in genocide, there is little agreement in how ideology contributes to violent outcomes. Others have cited rational explanations for atrocities.
  
  How ordinary people can become involved in extraordinary violence under circumstances of acute conflict is poorly understood. The foot soldiers of genocide (as opposed to its organizers) are not demographically or psychologically aberrant. People who commit crimes during genocide often do not fit stereotypes of evil, nor recognize themselves as perpetrators. Furthermore, researchers have recognized that people's behavior changes under the course of events, and someone might choose to kill one genocide victim while saving another. Although genocide perpetrators have often been assumed to be male, the role of women in perpetrating genocide—although they were historically excluded from leadership—has also been explored. Anthropologist Richard Rechtman writes that in circumstances where atrocities such as genocides are perpetrated, many people refuse to become perpetrators, which often entails great sacrifices such as risking their lives and fleeing their country.