Genocide

William D. Rubinstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317869955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Genocide is a topic beset by ambiguities over meaning and double standards. In this stimulating and gripping history, William Rubinstein sets out to clarify the meaning of the term genocide and its historical evolution, and provides a working definition that informs the rest of the book. He makes the important argument that each instance of genocide is best understood within a particular historical framework and provides an original chronology of these distinct frameworks. In the final part of the book he critically examines a number of alleged past and recent genocides: from native Americans, slavery, the Irish famine, homosexuals and gypsies in the Nazi concentration camps, Yugoslavia, Rwanda through to the claims of pro-lifers and anti-abortionists.

CHAPTER 1

Genocide in history

Mass murder is probably as old as the human race, but only in the twentieth century has it become so significant a part of the world scene as to become an issue of world-wide importance or, indeed, to have been given a name. (The term ‘genocide’ was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1944.) This work is an account of mass killings throughout history which have been termed ‘genocide’, and an attempt to understand when and why they have occurred.

Perhaps the most difficult single task confronting the historian of this subject is to define the term ‘genocide’ in a universally acceptable way. Despite numerous attempts during the past 30 or 40 years, there is no universally agreed definition of the term and there is never likely to be one.¹ On the contrary, definitional differences at the most basic level have led to some of the most fiercely contested and ill-tempered debates in scholarly circles of recent decades, debates which have only become sharper as more and more academics and activists have joined in.

The archetypal example of genocide in modern times, on any conceivable definition, was, of course, the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry before and, most directly and murderously, during the Second World War. Explicitly or implicitly, all debate over the meaning of ‘genocide’ proceeds from the Holocaust as the central, core example. Much of the fierceness of debate over the use of the term ‘genocide’ revolves around the question of whether or not the Holocaust was unique. To emphatic proponents of the view that it was, it constituted the only genuine attempt in recorded history literally to exterminate an entire people, an effort in which millions were killed in modern history’s clearest example of a dedicated, purposeful death machine, and which failed in its objective only because Nazi Germany lost the war.² To those who dissent, often passionately, from this view, the Holocaust was not only not unique, but was not a particularly extreme example of genocide, at least in terms of the numbers of its victims: according to the proponents of this view, Hitler killed far fewer European Jews than the number of Indians of North and South America who died in the century or so after European discovery in 1492, while other genocides and democides might have been just as bloody.³ The debate which has emerged on this question has become anything but ‘academic’, with such charges as those of antisemitism and the distortion of evidence being made by the fiercer proponents on either side. Moreover, given the growing importance of genocide, and the punishment of convicted war criminals, in contemporary international law and even in the active foreign policy goals of many nations and international bodies, an accepted definition of genocide has become a serious and major consideration in international affairs.

How does one reasonably define ‘genocide’? This is the most difficult question of all – a surprisingly difficult and vexatious question indeed – to which there is no easy or readily acceptable answer. Probably the best place to start is with a ‘common sense’ definition of the sort which most well-informed persons might give if asked. Genocide might then be defined as the deliberate killing of most or all members of a collective group for the mere fact of being members of that group. Genocide is normally carried out against an ethnic or religious minority, and entails the deliberate killing of such groups of non-combatants as women, children and the elderly, who are normally seen as protected by international law or common moral custom.

This is, one might suggest, a clear and straightforward definition which, to the well-informed ‘man or woman in the street’, seems surely to embrace what is commonly meant by ‘genocide’. Yet to virtually every word in this definition scholars and historians have taken exception, often furious exception. Even so seemingly basic a requirement as that the victims of a genocide must be killed for an example of genocide to have taken place has been queried repeatedly by historians, who have viewed as genocidal the forced removal of large numbers of children from a minority ethnic group in order to raise them as members of the dominant group. (Memories of the forced removal of large numbers of half-caste Australian Aborigines to be raised as Europeans, which occurred on a widespread basis between the 1920s and the 1960s, became, in the 1990s, a dominant political issue in Australia.) Indeed, under the United Nations Convention on Genocide, officially adopted in 1948 (extracts reprinted in the Appendix to this book) most ‘acts’ which are construed as genocide in international law do not entail the actual killing of a group, but comprise such categories as ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’ and ‘imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group’. Similarly, the element of deliberate intention to kill large numbers of a group would seemingly, on our ‘common sense’ definition, be an absolutely necessary requirement for genocide to have occurred, yet recent historians sympathetic to the plight of the American Indians at the hands of European settlers from 1492 onwards have repeatedly noted that while up to 95 per cent of Indians living in the Americas perished (according to those historians) over the century or so after the coming of the white man, most of this diminution in population occurred through such factors as the importation of virulent diseases previously unknown in the Americas, the destruction of settled life-styles, enslavement, and the psychological effects of conquest rather than through overt murders and slaughters, although plenty of these took place. According to these historians, however, a relatively sudden population decline of 95 per cent constitutes ‘genocide’, regardless of its origins, especially as entire tribes certainly disappeared. Some of these scholars have become involved in angry exchanges with those who argue (as many do) that the Jewish Holocaust was a unique example of genocide; given the vastly larger number of Indians who (according to them) perished after 1492, the Jewish Holocaust was not only not unique, but was not an especially large-scale example of genocide, as horrifying and evil as it obviously was.

The central example of the Holocaust demonstrates that it is, classically, an ethnic or religious minority which is slaughtered in a genocide. Yet probably most victims of deliberate mass murder by totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century were not members of an ethnic minority but those perceived as belonging to an allegedly dangerous political or social class group or those defined, by their killers, as belonging to such a group. Most of the millions who perished at the hands of Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot and the other Communist dictators died because the party’s leaders believed they belonged to a dangerous or subversive social class or political grouping; they perished, in other words, on ideological rather than ethnic or religious grounds (although Stalin certainly killed ethnic minorities on a mass scale, as did other Communist dictatorships). How to define or characterise such ideologically based mass killings has long been something of a difficulty for historians of genocide: unlike an ethnic category such as the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe, for whom a fairly precise number in the at-risk group could be given, the number of, say, Stalin’s enemies or groups perceived as dangerous or subversive to the Soviet regime could not be stated with precision, waxing and waning with the witch-hunting psychopathology of Stalin and his inner circle almost whimsically. To accommodate them in the catalogue of deliberate mass murders of a collective group, the political scientist R.J. Rummel has coined the term ‘democide’ to describe the mass killing of collective groups of persons apart from ethnic minorities. The term has also come to include mass killings on a smaller scale than the attempted slaughter of an entire group, for instance those who perished in the population transfers which accompanied the birth of independent India and Pakistan in 1947, or the mass killings in Indonesia in the 1960s. It is also sometimes used to describe such events as the bombings of civilians in Germany and Japan by the Allies during the Second World War, although to many any linkage of Allied bombing raids to ‘genocide’, however the term be modified, is a distortion of history.

Many other questions about the concept of genocide and its historical occurrence remain in dispute or unanswered. There is, for instance, an obvious sense in which genocides must be organised and carried out by a government or instrumentality (such as the Nazi SS) which was a direct arm of government. Certainly the genocides carried out by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century were all organised and directed by a government. But it may also be the case that genocides can be carried out by rebel armies, as some of the mass killings of the Taiping Rebellion in mid-nineteenth century China appear to have been; by irregular military forces under what might be termed ‘warlords’, as, perhaps, in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s; by loosely organised, perhaps spontaneous (but armed) gangs of ‘ordinary’ persons, not necessarily directed by a government body at all, as occurred in the intercommunal violence between Hindus and Muslims during the division of British India in 1947 and during the Rwanda genocide of 1994; by bands of religious fanatics, as was the case with Thuggee in India; or, on some definitions, in the context of long-standing customary folk mores, as with infanticide carried out on a wide scale in many hunter-gatherer societies. All of this shows the looseness of the term genocide and the difficulties in defining it precisely or limiting it to certain historical situations and to no others. Similarly, there is arguably a widespread sense that genocides can take place chiefly, if not almost always, in the unusual and abnormal conditions of a major war, such as the Second World War. Yet many genocides and democides – Stalin’s Purges of the 1930s and the Pol Pot massacres, to name only two – certainly occurred in peacetime, against internal ‘enemies’. Wars, even very major wars, are, historically, not necessarily linked with genocide. No genocide took place during the American Civil War, for instance, although perhaps 600,000 soldiers perished on both sides, while Napoleon conquered virtually all of Europe arguably without deliberately killing a single noncombatant civilian, and certainly never engaged in the systematic slaughter of any collective group. ‘Genocide does not equate with war,’ one historian who has closely studied war and genocide in the twentieth century has concluded.⁴

While many of the most infamous examples of genocide and democide were carried out by totalitarian dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, not all totalitarian dictators engaged in genocide: Mussolini certainly did not, at least in Italy (as opposed to Abyssinia) before about 1943. Lenin was no innocent in his treatment of perceived enemies of the Bolshevik regime, but compared with Stalin his rule was almost angelic. Some leaders of genocide and their henchmen were sadistic psychopaths who might well have been clinically insane, but Adolf Eichmann’s bureaucratic blandness has become notorious, through Hannah Arendt’s famous description, as the epitome of the ‘banality of evil’. Tamerlane, the medieval Mongol warlord whose trademark was the pyramids of skulls, numbering tens of thousands, that he made from the corpses of his murdered victims, was a highly cultivated man who enjoyed having works of history read to him as he ate. The remarks on history made by Hitler himself, in Mein Kampf and his Table Talk monologues, often exhibit very considerable talent, although of an entirely autodidactical kind.

Most typologies of genocide focus on the varieties of mass murder, with no direct attempt to employ chronological divisions as a central defining matrix. For instance – to cite one of many such schemas of genocide – Chalk and Jonassohn see four different types of genocide which they classify ‘according to their motive’: 1. ‘to eliminate a real or potential threat’; 2. ‘to spread terror among real or potential victims’; 3. ‘to acquire economic wealth’; and 4. ‘to implement a belief, a theory, or an ideology’.⁵ Plainly, such typologies are very useful and greatly enlarge our understanding of the motivations for genocide, although, in the twentieth century, virtually all genocides surely come under the fourth of their headings.

This work, however, attempts to classify genocides quite differently, according to the historical epoch in which they occurred: each specific genocide, it is argued here, was highly specific to the era in which it occurred and ought not to be seen, except in a very general way, as affecting or determining genocides in other of the eras of this schema. The historical typology of genocides which is argued for in this book is as follows:

1. Genocides in Pre-Literate Societies;

2. Genocides in the Age of Empires and Religions, c.500 BC–1492;

3. Colonial Genocides, 1492–1914;

4. Genocides in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–79;

5. Contemporary ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ and Genocides, 1945–date.

A number of features of this schema should be mentioned from the outset. Genocides in pre-literate and other pre-modern and non-Western societies are given much more attention in this book than in many other works on genocide. Commonly, indeed, genocides in the pre-literate and non-Western world are simply ignored in accounts of genocide and mass murder, thus giving the impression – often, it seems, deliberately intended – that only modern Western man is capable of genocide, which is often seen as a component of ‘modern’ society.⁶ The view argued in this book is that such an interpretation is emphatically wrong: mass murders occurred – so far as the archaeological and anthropological record permits us to reach a conclusion – in nearly all societies with, indeed, a near-certainty that much higher levels of mass killing existed in pre-literate societies than in ‘modern’ ones, as well as a range of other unimaginably horrifying, repellent and barbaric practices. This was perfectly obvious to Western observers who encountered pre-literate societies first-hand at any time between the period of the Voyages of Discovery and, perhaps, the Second World War, but has been obfuscated in a fairly consistent manner during the past 40 or 50 years, in part (arguably) because of our all-too-well internalised knowledge of the barbaric and murderous record of the modern European world, and in part because of what might fairly be termed ‘political correctness’ (in this case, an extension of the time-honoured ‘Myth of the Noble Savage’, so often a component of the post-Renaissance Western consciousness) which judges the enormities committed by non-Western peoples systematically more lightly than those committed by the modern West. In this work, it should be noted, the incredibly violent, savage and cruel beliefs and practices of most pre-literate societies are, if anything, not described at sufficient length or in frank detail: many volumes could be written on this subject, as, in fact, they were in ages past.

A second feature of this typology is that it sections off those genocides and democides which occurred in what is termed the ‘age of totalitarianism’, the period seen here as extending from the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the end of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in 1979. The ‘Age of Totalitarianism’ included nearly all of the infamous examples of genocide in modern history, headed by the Jewish Holocaust, but also comprising the mass murders and purges of the Communist world, other mass killings carried out by Nazi Germany and its allies, and also the Armenian genocide of 1915. All these slaughters, it is argued here, had a common origin, the collapse of the elite structure and normal modes of government of much of central, eastern and southern Europe as a result of the First World War, without which surely neither Communism nor Fascism would have existed except in the minds of unknown agitators and crackpots. The horrors of the ‘Age of Totalitarianism’ were, most certainly, not a universal product of this era: the English-speaking democracies were notably immune from virtually any hint of anti-democratic ideologies achieving power or influence, and their steadfastness eventually saw both Fascism and Communism disappear from the earth: a resolution and dedication for which they, and their leaders and peoples, cannot be thanked or praised too highly.

It is also argued in this book that the contemporary world has not seen an ‘age of genocide’. Contrary to popular belief, recent genocides have not been common and have occurred only rarely and unpredictably, even in Third World countries with endemic poverty, tribal and ethnic divisions, and no democratic traditions of any kind. The best-known alleged examples of contemporary genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’, for instance, in former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, were not part of a general pattern at all. Unlike Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union split into separate, independent states with no violence of any kind apart from that in the Caucasus region; dozens of Third World states have achieved independence without genocide resulting.

It follows from what has been said that it is largely if not wholly wrong for the observer to carry the experience of genocide from one of the eras posited in our typology into another. It seems highly unlikely, for instance, that anything remotely like the Jewish Holocaust could happen again in the contemporary world, certainly not as a product of an ideologically driven regime and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• 1 Genocide in history
• 2 Genocide in pre-modern societies
• 3 Genocide in the Colonial Age, 1492–1914
• 4 Genocide in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914–79
• 5 Genocide in the era of ethnic cleansing and Third World dictators, 1945–2000
• 6 Outlawing genocide and the lessons of history
• Appendix: The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
• Index