SLAIN ON ALTAR OF NATIONAL FERVOUR
by William Rubinstein
The Times Higher Education Supplement
September 22, 2006
Are mass murder and ethnic cleansing the essential foundations of
the modern state? asks William Rubinstein
Genocide in the Age of the Nation State Volume One: The Meaning of
Genocide Volume Two: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide
By Mark Levene I. B. Tauris, 266pp and 463pp£ 24.50 and £ 29.50 ISBN
1 85043 752 1 and 1 84511 057 9
The Great Game of Genocide By Donald Bloxham Oxford University Press
329pp, £ 21.00 ISBN 0 19 927356 1
The study of genocide has emerged as one of the most contentious and –
if this is the right word – popular growth areas in recent historical
research. This flows from the centrality of the Jewish Holocaust to
the modern consciousness of evil, as well as from the range of other
murderous catastrophes during the past century in Armenian Turkey,
the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Rwanda and elsewhere.
The questions at the heart of genocide – can it be defined
accurately? how does it arise? can it be prevented? – have spawned an
ever-growing array of books, articles, journals and conferences in a
subject notable for the extreme controversy these have often generated.
Mark Levene of Warwick University, a highly regarded scholar
of this subject, is engaged in a four-volume study of genocide,
the first two of which are out now. The first one, The Meaning of
Genocide, is an extended, wide-ranging discourse on the innumerable
definitional difficulties in coming to terms with the many ambiguities
of the term. The book is marked by a high level of intelligence
and wide-ranging knowledge, although it is often necessarily
controversial. In essence, Levene identifies genocide as a by-product
of modern state development.
He briefly discusses non-Western and pre-modern examples of genocide,
such as the massacres carried out by Shaka in southern Africa, but
his conclusions come down firmly on the side of those who argue
that genocide primarily grows out of "radical state development"
and "the historical transformations of human societies worldwide as
a politically and economically interacting and universal system of
modern – mostly nation – statesI At the outset it was the avant-garde
modernising states, usually in their colonial or imperial guise,
who were its prime exponent. Later it was primarily their foremost
global challengers, later on, all manner of postcolonial polities."
This volume is consistently interesting and obviously an important
contribution to the subject, although the work is arguably too
discursive, its contents arranged in a series of extended discussions
about the various definitional modes that have been proposed for
understanding genocide.
The second volume, The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide,
deals at length with European conquests of the frontier in America,
Australasia and elsewhere. Much here is of considerable originality
-for example, a discussion of the conquest of the Baltic areas by
the Teutonic knights.
More original still is an extended discussion of the situation in
the French Vendee in 1794, when the Revolutionary general Francois
Westermann carried out a systematic slaughter of the population
while suppressing an antirevolutionary insurrection, leaving perhaps
130,000 dead. Levene appears to see this slaughter as inherent in
the modernising tendencies of the French Revolution.
There are also extended discussions of the notorious suppression of
the Hereros in southwest Africa and the crushing of a Muslim revolt
in western China in the 1870s, which will be novel to most readers.
Nevertheless, like any discussion of this controversial subject,
Levene’s interpretation is often problematical. As with many other
historians of genocide, Levene may be too willing to see genocide as
an inherent component of Western state-building when it is arguably
no such thing.
Virtually all the infamous examples of genocide that occurred between
1914 and 1980 grew, plainly and immediately or indirectly, out of the
First World War and its consequences: the Armenian genocide of 1915,
the Jewish Holocaust and the other enormities of Nazi rule, Soviet
communism and then, in China and Cambodia, Asian communism. It is as
certain as any historical counterfactual can possibly be that none of
these would have occurred in the absence of the Great War, which, by
destroying the elite structure of most of Central and Eastern Europe,
granted power to fringe political movements and leaders who would have
remained in complete obscurity if normal prewar politics had continued.
Whatever Germany’s deeply rooted anti-Semitism and authoritarianism,
it seems impossible that Hitler would have come to power were it not
for the Great War, the defeat of 1918, the semi-legitimacy of Weimar
and the Great Depression. Indeed, without the First World War, it
seems unlikely that there would even have been a concept of genocide.
Nor is it the case that modern Western state-building is normally,
or often, marked by genocide.
Bismarck’s "small Germany" (excluding Austria), which existed between
1871 and the mid-1930s, was constructed and maintained without the
deliberate killing of a single civilian.
Levene also ranges widely to consider genocide in the colonial world.
He is well aware of the argument, put by Steven Katz and others, that
the introduction of virulent diseases by Europeans was responsible
for most of the sharp decline in indigenous numbers in the Americas
and Australia, but he argues that such a view fails to take into
account the "repeated abuse, rape and massacre, the scorched-earth
destructionI the starvation, induced trauma and psychic numbing"
that invariably (in his view) accompanied European settlement in
these places. Levene enters here into an extremely emotive area and
appears to be far too one-sided. There is no mention of the type of
society the Europeans were likely to find when they arrived.
Levene is far too sensible to indulge in the "myth of the noble
savage", but his silence may be read as an implicit endorsement of
such a view. What about Aztec Mexico, where human sacrifice was
at the heart of society, with about 15,000 sacrifices a year, or
150,000 per decade? The dedication of the Great Temple of Tenochtitl
n in 1487 was accompanied by at least 14,000 human sacrifices, which
some experts increase to 78,000. The royal court there included a
zoo in which animals fed on the remains of the sacrifice victims, a
"skull rack" with 60,000 skulls of these victims and "apartments for
human freaks", in the words of Stuart Fiedel. It is inconceivable
that the Spanish would not have suppressed this monstrous society,
and by any moral standards they were perfectly right to do so.
Levene refers in a footnote to the debate launched by the Australian
historian Keith Windschuttle about European killings of Tasmanian
Aborigines. Using on meticulous research, Windschuttle found that no
more than about 120 Tasmanian Aborigines were killed by Europeans.
Levene refers to Windschuttle’s book as a "whitewash", but offers
not an iota of evidence for this description and fails to note
Windschuttle’s exposure of shoddy, if not overtly fraudulent,
research by previous historians who made claims for much higher
levels of killings of Aborigines by whites that appear to be clearly
exaggerated. This is admittedly an area of great controversy, but
Levene is far from neutral.
Many of these arguments have been made in the context of the
"uniqueness" of the Jewish Holocaust. This debate has aroused fierce
controversy, arguably exceeding in passion any other historical
debate (as in Alan Rosenbaum’s edited collection Is the Holocaust
Unique?). Levene sensibly steers a middle course, accepting that
the Jewish Holocaust was unique in many respects, especially in its
refusal to make exceptions of virtually any Jews and in the relentless
assembly-line like nature of the Nazi killing machine. But he also
notes that other mass murders probably claimed more victims and were
arguably just as horrible. He shrewdly observes that the Jewish
Holocaust has created a "victimology" in which other groups have
been keen to show that they also suffered catastrophically from past
slaughters and – implicitly, if not explicitly stated – that they,
too, are entitled to the moral credibility that has unquestionably
come to the post-1945 Jewish world in sympathy for their suffering.
Donald Bloxham’s The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism,
Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Empire is a detailed
and sophisticated account of the Armenian genocide of 1915, placed
in the wider context of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. This
first-class work offers much new material and is probably the most
detailed and complex account in English of these terrible events.
Many of its conclusions are surprising, while others may not be
welcomed by all historians who have participated in the study and
debates about the Armenian catastrophe. Bloxham, for example, finds
that Germany’s role in the Armenian genocide, often highlighted
as significant and a direct precursor to the Nazi Holocaust,
has been exaggerated and overstated: "Evidence is non-existent of
German approval of the Turkish measures once it was known what they
ultimately meant."
Bloxham is more careful than most historians to note the
often-overlooked fact of anti-Muslim "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans
and Crete, which drove 1.5 million Muslims from these areas between
the mid-1870s and 1914.
He also places the Armenian genocide in the context of the fact that
it arose as a response to a Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia in
1914-15, a fact often omitted from accounts of these events.
The book provides a detailed history of the radicalisation of the
Committee of Union and Progress (the "Young Turks"), noting that the
outbreak of the war was crucial to this process.
Bloxham’s work may indeed be seen by some pro-Armenian historians
as at least moderately pro-Turk, in the sense that it offers a
three-dimensional account of these events rather than being an
automatic condemnation of the Ottomans. It is indeed difficult to
make full sense of these events, and Bloxham has probably struck
just the right note. The major leaders of the CUP and its genocide –
Ahmed Cemal, Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey – still remain among the most
faceless and anonymous of modern mass-murderers, a not-unimportant
reason for the mystery and controversy that surrounds these events.
William Rubinstein is professor of history, University of Wales,
Aberystwyth.
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