In 1999’s “Pangs” (wr: Jane Espenson/dir: Michael Lange), the Scooby Gang is faced with a moral dilemma: does even a slayer have the right to kill an avenging demon – the spirit of the slaughtered Chumash – that has a legitimate claim against her nation? Perhaps dialogue would be more appropriate? An exasperated Spike declares: “You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better?” Spike’s anger is well-founded. At this point the Scoobies have been committed for years to the extermination of a number of (demon) races, including Spike’s own; why, suddenly, are they contrite? Espenson and Lange’s analogizing of Native Americans and the undead strikes at the heart of a central ambivalence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon wrote his college honor’s thesis with Richard Slotkin, who’s Regeneration Through Violence provides a remarkably thorough and convincing critique of the attempts to create a political identity for American citizens through the genocide of Native Americans, but Whedon’s own mythology combines camaraderie and virtue with a defense of racial extermination. This paper is an examination of this ambivalence as it plays out in the primary story arc of Season Four. On the one hand, Season Four provides an extensive critique of exterminatory politics: the line between human and demon is crossed by Forrest and Giles, Spike begins his development from villain to hero, U.S. army aggression is repeatedly criticized, and Adam provides a disturbing picture of the Enlightenment project extended to the labeling and even vivisection of humans and demons alike. Nevertheless, as Neal King has pointed out, Buffy’s own heroic identity is acted out through the vigilante killing of scores of demons, and the Scoobies, labeled “insurrectionists” in episode 21 (“Primeval”), employ quasi-fascistic rationales and methods. Drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Thus Spake Zarathrustra, we will argue that this contradiction is central to the mythology of the Buffyverse, as well as to Whedon’s primary distinction between humans and demons, “the soul.”