A Century of Genocide : Utopias of Race and Nation

Rating:
Summary: Holocausts
Review: Interesting analytical comparative history of genocide in the twentieth century, in Russia, Germany, Cambodia, and Serbia. After invoking the case of Armenia the author shows the common core of these four in the light of the nineteenth century tide of race and nationalism. The emergence of race as a concept is demonized now, but the legacy of Darwinism tends to be underplayed, although the account makes clear the mood of Social Darwinist confusion leading up to the First World War and its coarsening of spirits (and Armenian overture) resulting in the walpurgisnacht to come. The concept of genocide was arguably miscast, since it applies too technically to racial issues. (Cf.The emergence of the term and the Genocide treaty, along with the life of its inventor Lemkin in A Problem from Hell. Also the case of Rwanda should be included, cf. A People Betrayed, by L. R. Melvern)

Rating:
Summary: It lacks something
Review: Several years ago Eric Weitz wrote a fascinating book about the German Communist Party which argued that its notoriously truculent and dogmatic nature was not simply the result of Stalinist domination, but instead reflected the party's own German traditions as well as an understandable reaction to Weimar's intolerance of them. One would think that Weitz would be an excellent author to write about twentieth-century genocide. But this comparative account of four major genocides is disappointing. By his own admission Weitz does not have sufficient scholarly expertise to study the genocides in Armenia and Rwanda. So instead he looks first at Soviet terror in general and the more specifically genocidal deportations carried out against various nationalities during and after World War Two. Then he looks at Nazi Germany, Pol Pot Cambodia and the Serbian attack on Bosnia. All of his four accounts share certain key similarities. First, all the perpetrators were moved by a utopian ideology. Second, all the perpetrators were in some way or another "modern" and sought to use modern instruments to carry out their crimes. Third, all the genocides took place in periods of profound social and political crisis. Fourth, all the genocides were able to use the mass complicity of the society as a whole. Fifth, all the genocides had their own savage rituals of inhumanity.

Not bad, and the discussion of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are based on a reasonable discussion of the latest research. But there are some real problems with Weitz's account. For a start consider the "utopian" nature of genocide. Weitz does not define what a "utopia" is. This is rather important, since "utopian" implies the impossible, indeed the impossible that it would be dangerous to attempt. But while the Holocaust was a uniquely cruel atrocity, it was hardly "utopian" since it was, in fact, all too possible to kill 90% of Polish Jewry. More problematically, to what extent can Serbian nationalism be viewed as utopian? Undoubtedly some people thought a victorious Greater Serbia would lead to a better future. But the dominant themes in Serbian propaganda were paranoia, fear and self-pity. Instead of looking to a glorious millennium, Serbs concentrated on the "collective guilt" of Croats and Bosnians with Nazism. What Utopias did the Hutus dream of, or the final rulers of the Ottoman Empire have? One may agree with Weitz that Hitler and his colleagues believed in a "redemptive" anti-Semitism. But how far did this filter down to his executioners? (It strikes me that Arno Mayer's oft-derided "Why did the Heavens Not Darken," about the connection of the Holocaust to a vicious war against Communism, does better at answering this question.) The modernity of "genocide" is also problematic. That is certainly the case with Cambodia. Weitz's focus on ideology and ideological logic does not explain why Pol Pot followed a path that no other Communist party did. At one point Weitz suggests that Pol Pot's policies flowed logically from an ultra-radicalism, yet at other points he notes that he had to purge the Communist party frequently. More importantly, emptying the cities and abolishing money does not strike me as clever plans to destroy the ancien regime while following Democratic Kamuchea's own path to industrial modernity.

There are other problems. While genocide is understandably linked to war and crisis, this is not always the case. When destroying half of the population of what is now Congo, Belgium faced no imminent threat, nor did it carry out its crimes for any other reason than greed. Too much concentration on utopia and conflation of it with "fanaticism" leads to tautology. We condemn genocides as acts of fanaticism, and then define as fanatical genocidal acts. Weitz's discussion of the Yugoslav crisis does not really explain why so many Serbs and other Yugoslavs would support a policy that would definitely make the new nations considerably less than the sum of their parts. At one point Weitz mentions that Yugoslavia had a weaker civil society than, say, Poland or East Germany. But what distinguished pre-Milosevic Yugoslavia was not an especially brutal Communist regime. Indeed, the opposite was the case. Nor did Milosevic Serbia lack opposition parties and an independent church. There were no shortage of Serbs who denounced Milosevic, but a profound shortage of those who denounced Srebnica, and Weitz does not really explain why. At times Weitz's arguments are weak. He discusses popular complicity with genocidal crimes, though his main example for Nazi Germany actually takes place in Lithuania. He takes an example of one Serbian thug who comments that a victim looks like a cabbage and generalizes that this how all Serbian fighters viewed Bosnians. This is part of a larger problem with Weitz's discussion of ritual. Much of what he says about tortures and the rituals of atrocities is true, much of it is obvious, much of it is fashionable, but none of it is new or original. Likewise the accounts of genocide, while obviously horrific, do not really get us close to the minds of the perpetrators. Ultimately this is a book that adds little to our knowledge.