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Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide: Part II
Dr Mark Levene is a Reader in History at the University of Southampton.
Type One warfare is between recognized and usually powerful sovereign states within the system. In the twentieth century the "totalization" of these interstate struggles, particularly in the way that, for instance during the Second World War, adversaries have indiscrimi nately targeted and murdered millions of the noncombatants of the opposing side, has led some writers not only to describe this type of warfare as "genocidal" but to discern similar psychological, technological, and political processes at work as those which inform genocide.
This, however, is to confuse the issue of moral repugnance with the observation of means and ends. The bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima, or for that matter the creation and active mobilization of nuclear arsenals capable of producing global annihilation, are arguably, no less "crimes against humanity" than Auschwitz or Treblinka.
They also suggest the obsolescence of either traditionally grounded or more recently formulated codes of military conduct which are supposed to act as brakes on unlimited warfare between combatants. Nevertheless, in this type of war there remains, however residually, and even where one side demands the unconditional surrender of the other, a Clausewitzian notion that the struggle is fought between "legitimate" adversaries and that at the end of the day negotiation rather than extermi, nation will determine the position of both victor and vanquished within the postwar world order.
The same is not true of the second type of warfare, however. This type is particularly characterized by circumstances in which a sovereign state, often a powerful one, acts against another state which it perceives to be "illegitimate." Usually the second state is much less powerful; one thinks of the British versus the Boer states at the tum of the century, Austria against Serbia in August 1914, Nazi Germany in its onslaught on Poland a global war later, or two decades later still, the United States versus North Vietnam.
The Japanese post-1937 invasion of China, or the Nazi post-1941 invasion of the Soviet Union might also, arguably, be included in this list, even though the perceived illegitimate states in question were relatively powerful ones, or, at the other end of the "power" spectrum, the Nigerians vis-a-vis a briefly secessionist Biafra. The diversity of these examples warns us that too much can be made of their common features.
Nevertheless, the nature of the Type Two warfare is characterized by the supposedly "legitimate" side dispensing in entirety with Geneva Convention-informed restraints on the grounds that the opposition are little more than "ter rorists," "saboteurs," or "bandits" incapable of fighting conventional, "civilized" war. Worse, they are succored by a native population whose cultural and social level is beneath contempt.
Racism invariably confirms this judgmental verdict. In the circumstances, all "necessary" measures for the liquidation of resistance are allowable: mass aerial bombardment, scorched earth, counterinsurgency, mass deportation, environmental devastation, as well as repeated retributive or disciplinary massacre without regard to the age or gender of victims. These features of indiscriminate warfare inevitably bear close resemblance to warfare Type Three which often (though not always) involves genocide.
Interestingly, Type Two is also much closer to Type Three in terms of its justification, the "enemy" in its resistance and obdurate unwillingness to submit being perceived to threaten the integrity of the agenda, or indeed existence, of the "legitimate" state. It is, therefore, "they," the adversary populace, by their misguided actions and belief systems, not to say their atrocities against "us," who are accused of culpability and responsibility for the perpetrator's "war of self-defense" which, as a result, has to be fought a la outrance and without mercy.
Type Two warfare becomes Type Three warfare when the enemy is no longer a perceived "illegitimate" state but a perceived "illegitimate" community within the territorial definition or imperial framework of the perpetrator state. Very unusually, as in the case of the Holocaust, this can be extended to embrace population groups within allied, vassal, or subject states. Strictly speaking, however, genocide is only a variant of Type Three, given that in many cases where a sovereign state assaults elements of its own subject population or citizenry it does so without resorting to total warfare against them.
For instance, the British struggle against the Irish, while undoubtedly vicious and punctuated by atrocity at its crisis stage in 1919-21, never spilled over into mass people-killing. The French struggle against the Algerian independence movement, in the 1950s and early '60s, teetered on its brink. The Nazi post-1939 occupation of Poland arguably went over it, not only in its extermination of the country's Jews and Roma, but in its response to Polish national resistance.
At stake here is what Vahakn Dadrian has referred to as the issue of "preponderant access to overall resources of power." Whitehall may never have contemplated genocide against the Irish not only because of inherent institutional restraints and humanitarian sensibilities but because it was ultimately unwilling to commit major resources to the struggle. Having assessed that the enemy could not be defeated, it opted to find another, diplomatic strategy which would involve a degree of compromise and the avoidance of catastrophe.
In other instances where the state is weak but possibly resistant to recognizing it, the ability to deliver genocide may be limited by lack of military or manpower capabilities and/or by the strength of the communal "enemy." The struggles in the southern Sudan, Iraqi Kurdistan, the Karen and other hill tribe regions of Burma, or the northern Tamil part of Sri Lanka, where the recognized government's monopoly of violence has been for much of the period of conflict far from absolute, and where in practice its administrative hold has been limited to the major towns as opposed to countryside, all provide contemporary illustration of this point.
Nevertheless, these examples are also highly relevant to the study of genocide inasmuch as they point to a sequence of events in which the states in question, increasingly frustrated by their inability to defeat these insurgencies, have lurched towards more radical all-embracing solutions culminating, as in some of these cases, in genocide. Thus I argue that "genocide occurs where a state, perceiving the integrity of its agenda to be threatened by an aggregate population-defined by the state in collective or communal terms-seeks to remedy the situation by the systematic, en masse physical elimination of that aggregate, in toto, or until it is no longer perceived to represent a threat."
Yet clearly there is something perplexing, not to say bewildering, in this proposed state-communal equation. Genocide research is predicated on the proposition that whatever genocide is, it cannot be considered warfare in the normally understood sense between two armed combatants-however unequally matched they may be-but an entirely one-sided affair in which a group of absolute perpetratorsAnchor apply instruments of terror, violence, and unremitting massacre against entirely defenseless, not to say innocent men, women, and children. Thus, to ascribe threat from the people who are mass murdered appears not simply to define genocide as a two-sided dynamic relationship between a state and an element of its population but to potentially infer that the perpetrator's actions are both legitimate and justifiable.
Indeed, where a state goes down this path it is invariably accompanied by the claim-as witness recent Serbian behavior with regard to Kosovo-that it is defending itself against an imminent danger to its national security, territorial integrity, or even sovereignty, while at the same time it is going to inordinate lengths not only to conceal the evidence for mass murder but to deny that it has killed anyone.
This discrepancy between an actual threat-where it exists at alland what the perpetrator claims to be a threat is at the very heart of what one might call the genocide conundrum. Yet, paradoxically, this is the very reason that the perpetrator's claims cannot simply be dismissed out of hand but requires very careful examination and evaluation not only in the forensic sense of proving whether mass killing did or did not occur but equally importantly in providing a necessary insight into the perpetrator's mindset.
The repeated tendency by perpetrators to conjure up or imagine enemies, or to make of real ones something much more terrifying and dangerous than they actually are, represents a clearly cultural and/or psychological dimension to the genocide phenomenon and one to which I will return later.
But cracking the conundrum cannot be achieved in isolation. Indeed it may be that it can only be found in the intersection between this dark-and essentially unquantifiable-side of the human condition and the level of state and interstate relations where leaderships are assumed to behave rationally in the best interests of their polities and societies.
Yet there is already a second conundrum here. Those who do not commit genocide, or at least have not done so in a twentieth-century time scale, do not necessarily look askance or in horror on those who have. Take, for example, this statement by a British observer of the first authentic twentieth-century example committed in 1904-05 by the Germans against the Herero and Nama people in South West Africa (Namibia): "There can be no doubt, I think, that the war has been of an almost unmixed benefit to the German colony. Two warlike races have been exterminated, wells have been sunk, new waterholes discovered, the country mapped and covered with telegraphAnchor lines, and an enormous amount of capital has been laid out." The unmistakably upbeat tenor of this comment stands in marked contrast to the language of the United Nations Convention in which genocide is reviled as an "odious scourge."
In principle, of course, leading politicians stand shoulder to shoulder alongside human rights activists and religious leaders in their condemnation of what in the popular mind is considered the most heinous of crimes. In practice, however, they tend to be much more selective, not to say circumspect, before leveling the accusation. Nor is this simply a case of narrow state interest. At the highest, supposedly most moral level of international relations, Kuper asserts "that for all practical purposes" the United Nations defends the right of "the sovereign territorial state...as an integral part of its sovereignty...to commit genocide."
There is, thus, clearly something quite schizophrenic about the international community's response to genocide. On the one hand it treats it with repugnance and has a Convention, signed by a majority of its states, which seeks to outlaw it; pours opprobrium on those who commit it; is in the process of creating a permanent international tribunal to bring its perpetrators to book; and yet, at the same time, has powerful members who either look the other way, or condone or even actively support incidents of it. Time after time. Could it be then, that states that have not committed genocide within the last one hundred years nevertheless see in those that have too close a reflection of their former selves?
Some scholars, notably R. J. Rummel and Irving Louis Horowitz, have posited the argument that the avoidance of genocide in western societies lies in the strength of their civic institutions, the separation of their executive and legislative branches, and above all, in their democratic, liberal traditions. Thus, societies which are tolerant, open, and democratic do not commit genocide.
Yet these assumptions involve a remarkable historical and more contemporary sleight of hand. True, polities that before 1900 had already experienced prolonged periods of nation and state building, that were well advanced in their industrializing and infrastructural development, and that consequently felt reasonably secure of their position within a wider geo-strategic context have been much less likely candidates, since then, for committing it. But in order to arrive at this happy condition, the leading modernizing states certainly did commit, at the very least, proto-genocides as well as a number of other practices, which under today's international rule book-created largely out of western Enlightenment thought and practice would be considered dubious if not downright illegal.
These included repeated recourse to war, conquest, and above all slavery. These practices, however, were crucial in providing these states with shortcuts to capital accumulation, which in tum fueled their techno logical cutting edge and industrial revolutions and which, by the mid to late-nineteenth century, had assured for them an entirely hegemonic position around the globe. Npt only was this the beginning of a new world order, but a "new world pecking order," in which these states set the tune and everybody else was expected to dance to it.
This would suggest that the twentieth century practice of genocide has more in common with states which are new, or are heavily engaged in the process of state and nation building, or are redefining or reformulating themselves in order to operate more autonomously and effectively within an international system of nation states. Thus, polities which were latecomers to it, including potentially very powerful ones like Russia and Germany, finding themselves at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the frontrunners, had to consider how best they could make up lost ground.
Willingly or unwillingly taking on board much of the leaders' administrative, military, and infrastructural aspects, superficially seemed the only way forward. The ensuing cultural, social, and institutional borrowings set in motion the most profound reformulation of economies and societies. One of the key dilemmas for such late nation states, however, was not simply the requirement to borrow from a culturally alien template but, once acknowledged as players within the system, how to keep up with it.
Its regulators and supervisors-the leader states-demanded of new candidates an implicit undertaking that they would transform themselves into polities which would operate effectively and coherently according to its rules. But being fundamentally and dynamically fueled by capitalism-by its very nature a cutthroat business-no new state could afford to stand still and had, rather, to find ways and means of staying afloat within this dominant political economy.
True, some states were able to do so by finding for themselves a secondary position under the economic or geo-political aegis of the leading nations, while a few, sometimes by dint of their geographic position, found for themselves a relatively comfortable niche by acting as trading intermediaries or entrepots. Still other later arrivals, particularly postcolonial newcomers, were able to trade on their poverty and underdevelopment to become major recipients of Western aid. These, interestingly, included a number of states which were to commit genocide.
This deterministic explanatory framework clearly has its limits and limitations. To restate a list of some of the main genocide perpetrators of this century-Germany, Russia (the USSR), the Ottoman empire (later Turkey), Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi-is hardly an invitation to obvious communality.
The range of this group in terms of wealth and power, not to say political and cultural background, represents a major disincentive while any attempt to suggest ideological proclivities or totalitarian systems as the connecting thread would either be stretching the point to the ridiculous or demanding comparison with other ideologically hardline or authoritarian prone regimes who have not been notable offenders.
Moreover, where do we find the distinction between those modernizing states who have committed genocide and the generality of those who have not? To argue that all such polities have the potentiality is all well and good but would require us to offer explanation for specific instances essentially on the basis of circumstance. Undoubtedly, circumstance is a crucial factor. But is it sufficient?
A final thrust of the deterministic approach might posit that what all our genocidal practitioner states share is a particularly acute anxiety about the wide and ever-increasing gap between themselves and the global leaders within the international system but in relationship to their special sense of a historic, or even mythic, tradition of premodern coherence, authority, or imperium, both in regard to their own societies and/or in a broader regional or continental arena.
Thus, genocide states/societies have been the ones with the strongest and most persistent complexes about having been blocked off from a position within the international system which they believe, on past historic record, ought to be theirs; have been the ones most prone to support leaderships who articulated this anger and resentment; and, consequently, also have been the ones mostly likely to radicalize their domestic arrangements as well as foreign policies in ways that consciously contravened or challenged the system's "liberal," inclusivist ground rules.
This state of mind is perhaps best encapsulated in the poem, "Esnaf Destani," written by the famous Turkish nationalist, Ziya Gokalp soonAnchor after a series of catastrophic Ottoman defeats in Tripolitania and the Balkan wars:
- We were defeated because we were so backward. To take revenge, we shall adopt the enemy's science. We shall learn his skill, steal his methods. On progress we will set our heart. We shall skip five hundred years. And not stand still. Little time is left.
The genocidal mentality, in other words, is closely linked with agendas aimed at accelerated or force-paced social and economic change in the interests of "catching up" or alternatively avoiding, or circumventing, the rules of the system leaders. If this gets us a little closer to the wellsprings of the genocide phenomenon, it still falls somewhat short of explaining why and how state/societal frustrations are unleashed on specific domestic populations.
After all, the enemy in Gokalp's message appears to be the West. As a result, rapid infrastructural overhaul and military industrialization should logically have geared Ottoman Turkey only toward Type One warfare as the route to break out from the system's perceived straightjacket. And we might at this juncture also note that other states at various times have adopted this formula without obvious recourse to genocide.
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