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Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide
Dr Mark Levene is a Reader in History at the University of Southampton.
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 perpetrators apply instruments of terror, violence, and unremitting massacre against entirely defenseless, not to say innocent men, women, and children.
However, where a state goes down the path to genocide, it is invariably accompanied by the claim--as witness Serbian behavior with regard to Kosovo--that it is defending itself against an imminent danger to its national security, territorial integrity, or even sovereignty.
This discrepancy between an actual threat and 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 require very careful examination and evaluation or 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.
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."
An obvious conclusion one might draw is that perpetrators of genocide are stridently ideological or authoritarian regimes more often than not led by unhinged, psychopathic dictators. Popular portrayals of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, or Pol Pot only reinforce the sense that their actions against "imagined" enemies are essentially symptoms of extreme paranoia, delusion, and projection.
The very fact that in some instances, as for example in the case of the "kulaks," the construction of a coherent and identifiable adversary took place in the heads of the Stalinist leadership and bore no relationship to social realities, only adds to the view that our subject is one primarily for clinical psychological investigation.
Nazi ranting and raving about Jewish world conspiracy as just cause for their actions would suggest that worst cases of genocidal behavior are not simply deeply irrational but completely mad.
The problem with this line of reasoning, however, is threefold. First, while the alleged "madness" of the above genocide instigators is not easily verifiable one way or the other, an extended list which might, for instance, include Atatiirk, Mao, and Milosevic, would be hard-pressed to support the generality of this assumption.
Second, even where genocidal states are totalitarian and heavily policed, they are founded on a domestic support base--however limited or narrow that may be--which must itself at least in part be mobilized as accomplices in the perpetration of genocide.
It must therefore follow that either this support base is itself suffering from similar delusions as its leaders, or alternatively believes that the leadership is acting rationally in the best interests of polity and people.
In fact, the two positions are not necessarily irreconcilable. Norman Cohn provocatively demonstrated years ago the manner in which fantasies reminiscent of medieval times took strong hold of a significant proportion of post-1918 German society, including, indeed especially, amongst many highly educated and professional people, in the form of the notion that worldwide Jewry, despite its dispersal, minority status and history of persecution, was actually spearheading an international, even cosmic conspiracy to emasculate and ultimately wipe out not only the German people but all western civilization.
Fears of sexual, cultural, and mental contamination, of the spread of disease and consequent debilitation of a healthy, virile volk by the Jewish race, it could be argued, did not so much have to be manufactured by the Nazis but simply echoed and then amplified as the visceral instincts of a Vox populi. In this way, state organized genocide is actually constructed not from the top down, but bottom-up from hate models provided by grass-roots societal phobias.
What all these scenarios share in common is the state leaderships' conviction of the malevolence of forces "out there" that have conspired not only to frustrate the realization of their agenda, but to harm and even possibly physically eradicate their own people. This does not rule out instances where these anxieties have some grain of truth in them.
However, the most extraordinary examples of genocide are those notable for the complete absence of any concrete evidence to suggest that a communal group qua group has the intention, let alone ability, to carry through such a maleficence. The Nazi assertion that "the Jew is the German people's most dangerous enemy" perhaps represents the most thoroughgoing example.
The statement made in the Serbian parliament in 1991 that "the truth is that all non-Serb ethnic groups, especially the Croats, are at this very minute preparing the genocide of all Serbs" suggests that such projections are hardly exclusive to the era of Stalinism and fascism.
Indeed, the persistence and prevalence of genocide since the destruction of Nazism--running to an average of almost one case a year since 1945--must lead one to further ponder what motor continues to drive this seemingly irresistible lunacy?
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