Theatres Of Violence

Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History

Philip Dwyer, Lyndall Ryan, Philip Dwyer, Lyndall Ryan

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857453006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Massacres and mass killings have always marked if not shaped the history of the world and as such are subjects of increasing interest among historians. The premise underlying this collection is that massacres were an integral, if not accepted part (until quite recently) of warfare, and that they were often fundamental to the colonizing process in the early modern and modern worlds. Making a deliberate distinction between 'massacre' and 'genocide', the editors call for an entirely separate and new subject under the rubric of 'Massacre Studies', dealing with mass killings that are not genocidal in intent. This volume offers a reflection on the nature of mass killings and extreme violence across regions and across centuries, and brings together a wide range of approaches and case studies.

PART I

MASSACRE AND ATROCITY IN THE ANCIENT AND PRE-MODERN ERAS

CHAPTER 1

THE ORIGINS OF MASSACRES

John Docker

Extreme violence, as in war, massacre and often in genocide, raises disturbing questions about us as a species. Extreme violence haunts our sense of the fundamental nature of humanity, of history as progress, of the ethical bases of societies, of the honour of nations, of ethnic and cultural identity, of intellectual life itself, which is intricately entwined with all these questions. Massacre and genocide studies, separate yet closely related fields, are moved by an anxiety that genocide and massacre possess features that may be impossible to explain. For example, why do groups suddenly turn on their neighbours with whom there may have been friendly relations for many years, why do massacres occur at certain times and not others, in what ways do massacres involve or not involve state authorities, or are massacres coldly calculated or inspired by passion and fantasy? Why do massacres often involve the most appalling atrocities, as in mutilation, disembowelling, cannibalism, the drowning of or setting fire to victims? Are certain kinds of societies, like democracies or totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, less or more propitious to massacres happening? How implicated historically is religion across the world?

Massacre scholars like Jacques Semelin emphasize that such dreadful happenings constitute enigma and mystery.¹ We might say that the genre of massacre studies, in its epistemological uneasiness, finds itself drawn to the baroque and Gothic, genres of disorientation and derangement. A methodological premise of massacre studies – we can see it in Mark Levene’s work as well as that of Semelin – is that massacres are characteristically so gruesome that in trying to comprehend them no single discipline in the humanities and social sciences will necessarily suffice; we need all our scholarly resources, from anthropology to history to sociology to psychology to the study of literature and art.² We must, says Semelin, always be ‘multi-factoral’.³ Even then, as Mark Levene and Semelin stress, caution is always required in our attempts to establish general patterns or characteristics; in the rhetoric of massacre studies there is a fondness for terms like ‘however’ or ‘yet’ or ‘that said’, as soon as a general proposition is advanced.

In genocide and massacre studies, methodology must be both cautious and daring. Dan Stone urges those who study extreme violence and destruction to be as imaginative and innovative as possible in seeking explanations,⁴ and suggests that historians draw on other disciplines like anthropology and cultural theory.⁵ Stone proposes that modern genocides and massacres, such as in Cambodia and Rwanda, the Rape of Nanjing and My Lai, share, in anthropological terms, a transgressive violence: the enjoyment of violence, including killing and anticipation of killing, and the theatre of violence itself.⁶ The perpetrators enjoy the acts of violence to a degree that can be called orgiastic, and together, in the act of killing, the perpetrators form temporary ecstatic communities, experiencing a heightened sense of belonging to their own group in the act of performing violence, which may also be erotically charged: a collective effervescence in belonging. Like Levene and Semelin, Stone believes that extreme violence and destructiveness dissolve the opposition between the civilized and barbarous, referring to George Bataille’s contention that the same peoples can be alternately barbarous and civilized in their attitudes and actions; so called ordinary or normal people, says Stone, commit genocide and massacres.⁷ Indeed, we might reflect that in history the very distinction between the civilized and barbarous so favoured in European and Western history is a major cause of violence, including extreme violence, upon those considered uncivilized or less civilized.

As fields, genocide studies and massacre studies overlap but can also follow different paths. Although genocide as a mode of inter-group violence frequently involves massacre, massacres can be a distinct and more diffuse phenomenon, involving for example the actions of a single individual. Thus violence against groups can encompass the killing of twenty-nine Palestinian Muslim worshippers by Baruch Goldstein in Israeli-occupied Hebron in February 1994, or the lone gunman who in March 1996 walked into a school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and fatally shot sixteen little children and their teacher.⁸

Concepts were often once metaphors, or concealed metaphors within them; concepts carry a history of such metaphoric traces like a palimpsest, creating ambivalence and layered shifting meanings.⁹ In France in the sixteenth century, the term ‘massacre’ was thus once used for a butcher’s chopping block. In 1545, the judges of the sovereign court of Provence undertook a campaign that has been referred to as religious cleansing, attacking Protestant heretics, such as the Waldensians, involving assaults on their communities as part of a larger pattern of campaigns to extirpate the growing Protestant heresy. A pamphlet around this time referred to the campaign against the Waldensians as ‘un massacre’, and the name stuck. In its palimpsestial history as a concept then, massacre suggests, in the metaphor of the butcher’s chopping block, a swift and terrible action. But from the beginning massacre could also be recognized as part of a longer term process, in this particular instance involving the decades long campaign against Protestant heretics that would culminate in the spectacular St Bartholomew massacre of August 1572. From France, the term then entered the English political vocabulary.¹⁰ The term massacre then encompasses within itself the possibility of both event and process or sequence.

Raphaël Lemkin Defines Genocide

The original definition of genocide so eloquently proposed by Raphaël Lemkin, the brilliant Polish-Jewish and then American jurist in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, is far more wide-ranging than definitions proffered in the decades that followed, especially those of North American sociologists, influenced by recognition of the Holocaust from the 1970s to the 1990s, which reduced genocide to clearly intentional state-directed mass death.¹¹ Lemkin suggested that his new concept was derived from the Latin cide and the Greek word genos (tribe, race). Genocide, then, shares with terms like tyrannicide, homicide, fratricide a notion of sudden sharp action, a terrible event or episode. However, in insisting on genocide as wide-ranging, in both his published writings and in his manuscript book on the worldwide history of genocide which remained unfinished and unpublished when he died in 1959, Lemkin was suggesting that genocide could thereby include long-term and incremental processes as well as catastrophic events, acts or episodes.

According to Lemkin, genocide is to be regarded as composite and manifold; it signifies a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of life of a group. Such actions can but do not necessarily involve mass killing. They involve considerations that are cultural, political, social, legal, intellectual, spiritual, economic, biological, physiological, religious, and moral.¹² Genocide can encompass long-term processes like settler colonialism that may include destructive acts, episodes or events:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.¹³

Lemkin’s definition of genocide here as a two-fold process of destruction and replacement, a process that entwines genocide and colonization, has explosive implications, and proved a major inspiration for the New Genocide Studies which has flourished since the 1990s.¹⁴ In the unfinished manuscript book, Lemkin develops a sophisticated methodology that permits the possibility of intricate and subtle analyses of genocide. He points out that the relationship between oppressor and victim in history is always unstable, and that in world history there are many examples of genocidal victims transforming into genocidists, the formerly persecuted into the persecutors of others. He highlights recurring features in historical genocides: mass mutilations; deportations under harsh conditions often involving forced marches; attacks on family life, with separation of men and women and the removal of the opportunity of procreation; removal and transfer of children; destruction of political leadership; death from illness, hunger, and disease through overcrowding on reserves and in concentration camps.¹⁵ Is it necessary to observe how similar such phenomena of genocide are to at least some features of massacre?

The Origins of Violence

Discussions of genocide, colonialism and empire often focus too narrowly on modernity, as if that is sufficient to illuminate all we need to know about the questions we ask. The notion of genocide, however, can indeed go back a long way, and has attracted the attention of key theorists in primatology and world history such as Jane Goodall and Jared Diamond. Goodall’s premise is that since humans and chimpanzees once diverged from common stock, behaviour patterns that exist in modern humans and modern chimpanzees were probably present in that common ancestor, and therefore in early humanity as well.¹⁶ Part of her study is devoted to the aggression and violence that occurred when a group from the Kasakela community of chimpanzees split away and began to live in a different valley. In the 1970s, Goodall and her fellow field workers recorded the assaults on and dispersal of the breakaway Kahama Valley community by the Kasakela group, their relatives and with whom they had had affectionate relationships. It was in 1972 that Goodall’s observers recognized that the new community, the Kahama group, had come into existence at Gombe, but it was to last for only five years. In 1974 the Kasakela males initiated a so...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables, Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Massacre and History
• Part I. Massacre and Atrocity in the Ancient and Pre-Modern Eras
• Part II. The Colonial Frontier
• Part III. Contested Narratives: Memory, Atrocity and Massacre
• Part IV. The Dynamics of Modern Massacre and Mass Killings
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index