GETTING TO THE VERY ROOTS OF GENOCIDE
By Graeme Wood
New York Sun, NY
Oct 3 2007
How much murder is too much? Ethnic cleansing is a crime, but what
qualifies? Does slaughtering a village count, or do you have to lay
waste to a larger polity, perhaps with some torture thrown in? How
many people do you have to kill before graduating from mere mass
murder to full-on genocide?
The legal answer, strangely enough, is zero. In Ben Kiernan’s "Blood
and Soil" (Yale University Press, 606 pages, $40), a meticulous
new study of this most slippery of criminal categories, he points
out that the standard definitions of genocide – those offered by the
U.N.’s Genocide Convention and International Criminal Court Statute –
require not even a single death, or indeed any physical harm at all.
In fact, the genocidaire need not even target a whole ethnic group.
To win a place in the defendant’s chair – or a mention in Mr. Kiernan’s
book – requires only the attempt to cause that group "serious mental
damage." The extermination of European Jewry counts, but so does a
single British colonial officer’s efforts to take away an Australian
aboriginal child from her parents, involving, as it did, the intent to
"breed out the color."
These legal standards are in a way too narrow, since surely the
cold-blooded murder of a whole village is vile enough to merit
opprobrium, regardless of whether it fits a strict definition of
"genocide." In "Blood and Soil," Mr. Kiernan highlights the contrast
between our conventional and our legalistic definition of genocide by
choosing case studies that, with few exceptions, attain the highest
standard of vileness. And yet, the definitions offered by the UN and
the ICC do say something meaningful about the nature of genocide:
Even when physical facts (such as the number dead, and at whose hands)
are freely acknowledged, the intent of the perpetrators is actually
the key issue.
This 600-page volume plumbs the mens rea of the ethnic cleanser,
from the Punic Wars to Darfur. The exhibits range from the well-known
(Tutsis in Rwanda, Jews in World War II) to the more obscure (the
brutality against the Herero by colonists in 1904 German Southwest
Africa) to the forgotten (the Chams whose 15th-century empire was
annihilated by the Vietnamese). The chapters on the least known of
the genocides offer particular value as introductions to overlooked
regional histories, and the material on the Nazis and Ottoman Turks
nicely situate both those groups within larger contexts of ethnic
violence. Each case is written sharply enough to escape the aroma of
potted history that sometimes afflicts comparative studies of this
type or political accounts, such as Samantha Power’s "A Problem from
Hell: America and the Age of Genocide."
But the most unsettling aspect of "Blood and Soil" is its repeated
emphasis on agriculture as a historical driver for genocidal
impulses. In nearly every genocide Mr. Kiernan cites, the aggressors
prided themselves on their prowess as cultivators and denounced their
victims as inferiors because they lived in cities or were traditionally
pastoral. Europeans all came from civilizations built on farming. The
groups they targeted never farmed with the same enthusiasm: The Aztecs
had small communal plots, and the Herero lived as nomads. The word
"savage," Mr. Kiernan points out, shares its roots with "sylvan,"
meaning "of the forest," and therefore not part of a settled society
that survives through farming.
Mr. Kiernan argues that the rate of genocidal violence of agrarian
societies against non-agrarian ones is high enough that we should
consider cultivation – and especially the romanticization of farming,
coupled with utopian or religious zeal – a leading indicator of
genocide. As a purely practical matter, the development of agriculture
is a prerequisite to having enough idle and stationary time to craft
the tools and strategy for genocide on large scales.
And historically, the pattern simply seems to fit. During the Punic
Wars, Cato the Censor – who ended his every Senate speech with a
plea for the obliteration of Carthage – whipped up his hatred by
idealizing the Roman gentleman farmer, in contrast to the moneylenders
and merchants of Carthage. Echoes of the same complaint provided
inspiration to the grisly conquista by Spanish settlers who thought
native Mesoamericans lacked nobility in their inability to subdue the
land through cultivation. Hitler, too, idealized the German farmer,
and Mr. Kiernan quotes a line of Himmler’s to the effect that the
flower of German military valor grew in the fields of the Fatherland,
and that cowards all hailed from the cities.
It’s possible to lapse into determinism of one kind or another when
examining genocide, and invoking agricultural lebensraum as motivation
for mass killing, as Mr. Kiernan does, comes close.
Explaining mass murder through protein scarcity or overpopulation
seems inadequate at best, and at times the explanations themselves
smack of racism, due to their implication that among certain races,
but not among others, a natural reaction to overpopulation is to hack
off a neighbor’s limbs. But Mr. Kiernan is more disciplined than the
determinists. In his model, genocides do not grow out of resource
scarcity. Rather, they happen as a matter of farmer-on-nomad violence,
and agrarian idealism – instead of any actual pressure on the land –
is merely one frequent factor.
Moreover, unlike others, such as Jared Diamond, he treats the
perpetrators as agents and allows them to name their own reasons
for genocide. Those perpetrators are often startlingly honest, and
unexpectedly articulate in their fetish for land cultivation and for
national soil. Gen. James Wilkinson, commander of the American Army
under Jefferson, wrote candidly that if American Indians could not be
induced to start using the land properly by farming like Europeans,
"the seeds of their extermination, already sown, must be matured."
When the aging leaders of the Khmer Rouge – a movement that murdered
millions in service of a nationalist agrarian ideal – finally came
in from the jungles in the late 1990s, they apologized for excess
loss of life during their rule, but they also took care to regret
the damage done to animals and land.
This is grim stuff, made grimmer still by the book’s implication
that genocide is a normal feature of history, and that it seems to
feed on itself. Mr. Kiernan points out that perpetrators of genocide
often look to previous genocides as models. In the language of his
battlefield orders, Hernan Cortes showed evidence of familiarity with
Julius Caesar’s ruthless and genocidal campaigns against northern
European tribes. Hitler famously asked whether anyone remembered the
Armenian genocide. Somewhat less famously, the Third Reich profited
from Germany’s experience in Southwest Africa years before. In the
concentration and extermination of the Herero and Nama, one sees not
only models for the spurious racialism of Nazi Germany but for the
death camps themselves. Indeed, one of the most disturbing aspects of
genocide is that its successful and unpunished commission bequeaths
to future generations – even generations centuries hence – the belief
that mass killing is a legitimate option, and that here are indeed
a few ways in which it can be done.
Mr. Kiernan hopes that his book will help identify and prevent future
genocides, and he briefly addresses modern instances of genocide,
such as Darfur, as well as the question of whether violent strains
of Salafi Islam contain the seeds of a genocidal movement. He thinks
they do. (Curiously, neither of these instances fit his model of
agricultural chauvinism of genocides past. The losing side in Darfur
consisted of cultivators, and the Janjaweed are mostly pastoralists.)
These modern cases demonstrate some of the limitations of the analysis
of "Blood and Soil": although both the Janjaweed and Al Qaeda show
signs of genocidal intent – and indeed actual genocide – labeling
them does little to help us deal with them. Whether something is
"genocide," and whether it follows the intriguing historical patterns
that Mr. Kiernan identifies, is not really the point when we consider
taking immediate action. The slogans of those who want to "stop the
genocide" invariably conceal grand complexities, such as the long
civil war in Darfur, as well as grand simplicities, such as the
wickedness of radical Islam. The relevant facts to acknowledge are
the complexity and the wickedness: Whether there is also genocide,
agriculturally-induced or otherwise, is, for all but the historian
and the lawyer, a moot point.
Mr. Wood is a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly.