LIES PROLIFERATE IN THE WORLD’S KILLING FIELDS
Canberra Times (Australia)
May 3, 2008 Saturday
Final Edition
This remarkable but harrowing encyclopedia of genocide could induce
repetition strain, outraged denials, possibly even a sorrowful yearning
to join a kinder species. After Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined
the term "genocide" postwar, the UN defined this as "acts committed
with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial,
ethnical, or religious group".
Ben Kiernan, a Yale-based Australian historian, takes his main title
from an ideological tract of 1930s Germany. The first two parts review
"imperial and colonial" slaughters up to the early 20th century while
the third considers a "multiplicity" of subsequent genocides. Kiernan’s
summation of the Third Reich restates his four perceived correlates
of state-linked killing: "The Nazi killing machine" was "operated
by interlocking ideological levers that celebrated race, territory,
cultivation, and history". To make his case, the author is forever
splicing unexpected and illuminating primary-source threads that come
from years of practice. I was comfortable with his limited material
on the recent past and substantial reluctance to forecast the near
future. Yet I kept thinking of the elephant (I mean, the anthropoid)
in the room our evolution and biology. The durable pre-Christian
state of Sparta is typecast as "secretive, militaristic, expansionist"
and as a source of myth for the short-lived Reich.
Another potent idea surfacing early is that, by accident or design,
artists and intellectuals supply lethal ammunition for politicians and
generals. So you read Cato the Censor’s famous interdiction against
Carthage, but also Hesiod’s and Virgil’s poetry of the plough. Early
Christian and Jewish writers, argues Kiernan, shunned racialist
thinking, the term "race" only becoming prominent in medieval
times. In the first of his case studies, he finds the Spaniards
plumbing "intellectual depths" for God’s consent to the Central
American conquest.
But he also reveals the to-and-fro of contemporary debate. Various
citations from the early 1500s regret the Mexican and Guatemalan
bloodbaths. "War" commingles with "genocide" in the East
Asian examples. National role-reversals and repetitions become
familiar. Under a metaphorical alliance of "writing and chariots",
the Buddhist kingdom of Dai Viet crushes its formerly competitive
rival Champa, only to pay a heavy price later. Inspired by "ancient
precedents", Japan of the 1500s assaults Korea, but "genocide abroad"
is a harbinger for "violent cultural suppression at home". Japan
reappears in the context of its 20th century Chinese and Pacific
incursions. The chronicle of England’s 16th century Irish depredations
resonates. A cabal of Elizabethan "neo-cons" appears to agitate,
not only for rivers of tears in Ireland, but also for the later
miseries of indigenous America and Australia. Although Elizabeth
herself is "parsimonious" in support, there follow martial law and
massacre. In the peculiar logic of extermination, the Irish locals
don’t quite cut it as proper yeomen, but kill one and you could go
for the lot. Blood and Soil implies an 80-90 per cent decline from
all causes in the indigenous North American (Australian) population
over 1492-1800 (1788-1901). It suited English settlers in eastern
America to discount the agricultural Native American settlements
they displaced. But the "genteel, controlled, expanding rural idyll"
of early 1700s Virginia could "explode in genocidal rage". George
Washington’s late- 1700s war secretary writes that colonial settlement
has been "even more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct
of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru". The Jeffersonian democracy,
in Kiernan’s view, required Native Americans to yield up "their
lifestyle, their lands, or their lives without the vote". Once the
Cherokee nation is erased, the California indigenes are trampled in
the dashes for "scientific racism" and precious gold. Next come the
wars and woes of Australian settlement. Up to Federation, the author
estimates that "multiple deliberate killings" by squatters, mounted
police and others accounted for 20,000 Aborigines. He concedes that
frontier interactions were diverse and some settlers abhorred the
violence. But with racial "science" casting Aborigines as inferior
nomads, "classical pastoralism" and government directives could drive
an ideological program to convert indigenous lands. Denialism continues
in Australia as elsewhere.
This, I note, includes an animus towards "Genocide Studies" and the
broad UN definition of genocide. Call it or count it as you will,
the evidence repeated here is part of Australian history. It is that
colonial agencies condoned or sometimes conducted the "dispersals",
which were aired in their assemblies, investigations, reports
and journals. If some of those Spanish imperialists and American
republicans could ‘fess up then, maybe we can now. The cynical
collateral damage of the American and Australian land-rushes
is distinguishable from the following Armenian and Holocaust
slaughters. Typically, Kiernan first explains lebensraum, a
geographer’s neologism to accompany Germany’s South West African
occupation around the turn of the 20th century. From there, he picks
at the rancid racial fears and florid territorial fantasies of Hitler,
Himmler and supporting theoreticians. Sustained by myths of Sparta,
Rome and ancient Germany, Hitler could claim his ancestors were "all
peasants" and impose a Germans-only Hereditary Farm Law. It is often
remarked that citizens, not psychopaths, were the Nazi functionaries.
Kiernan doesn’t go there much, apart from his neat opening point
that genocidal enterprises require both "apocalyptic vision and
prudent compromise". What he does illustrate is the even bigger
territorial-ethnic engineering scheme the Reich had waiting in the
wings. Soviet Russia is portrayed both as Nazi victim and Stalinist
perpetrator of its own monumental program against the kulaks and
the elite. But China is said to have exacted a famine toll far in
excess of Stalin’s. I’ll leave the experts to determine whether state
famine equals genocide. Blood and Soil concludes by touring the post-
1950 killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Indonesia, Pakistan (in
Bangladesh), Guatemala (once again), Saddam’s Iraq, Bosnia, and Sudan
(Darfur). Khmer Rouge rhetoric is compared and contrasted with that
of Rwanda’s Hutu Power. At the outset, Kiernan guesses that the 21st
century might be "bleak". He also nods to the surprising evidence that
the genocide (or war or murder) toll is trending downwards relative
to population. At the end, he remains convinced of his four great
genocidal narratives. But surely his outstanding demonstration is that
all through history the narrators of these themes are telling fibs. To
what extent then are the themes correlates or causal factors in mass
killing? The book, as it happens, cites the biological metaphors of
genocide rather than the underlying biology. I believe that more of
an interweaving from evolution, culture and technology would sharpen
the expositions emerging from genocide studies. The human lineage,
after all, appears to have been evolving and deploying its uncommon
adaptation of territorial inter-group violence since Paleolithic
times. When Carthage finally fell in 146 BC, it was long after men
in militias had first sacked settlements, but long before six billion
humans had stormed the planet.
Stephen Saunders is a Canberra reviewer.