LANDS OF THE LOST: TOME MINES THE LINKS BETWEEN SYSTEMIC POPULATION EXTERMINATIONS AND CONQUEST
Jennifer Daniel
Baltimore City Paper, MD
Nov 14 2007
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from
Sparta to Darfur
On Oct. 10, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs voted
on legislation that would officially recognize as "genocide" the
systematic slaughter of between 600,000 and 1.2 million Armenians
by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1917. The motion–approved 27
to 21–drew protests from both U.S. and Turkish officials; indeed,
countries have long shunned tainting their national histories with
such a loaded word. The term conjures up images of human suffering
unbearable to confront–why publicly acknowledge such intentionally
perpetrated horrors when it would be more palatable to forget or
suppress them?
The overall impact of this political call for accountability remains
to be seen. What it represents, however, is a concerted effort to
learn from the tragedies and mistakes of the past by officially
recognizing them, an idea central to Ben Kiernan’s massive Blood
and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta
to Darfur. In a little over 600 pages, Kiernan details not only the
Armenian genocide but also the numerous mass murders that took place
before and since in eras and regions synonymous with the terrible
events that line our history books: Rwanda, Colonial America,
Stalinist Russia, Nanking, East Timor, Nazi-occupied Europe. The end
result is exactly what you would expect from a work of this nature:
a lengthy, tiring, and frightening litany of burnings, beheadings,
stabbings, shootings, beatings, hangings, gassings, rapes, starvations,
sacrifices, imprisonments, and enslavements.
Working under the definition of genocide set by the 1948
U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide–"acts
committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
racial, ethnical, or religious group, as such"–Kiernan explores four
recurring themes in historical exterminations. The first two, racism
and territorial expansionism, are relatively obvious culprits; we’ve
known since grade school that human beings don’t react too kindly to
fundamental differences in skin color and that someone always loses in
games of land-grabbing. More interesting are his ideas on what he calls
"cults of antiquity" and agricultural supremacy as equally responsible
factors for the murders of innocent men, women, and children in the
wake of overwhelming and impersonal sociopolitical movements.
Cato the Censor’s closing injunction during his Roman Senate speeches,
"Delenda est Carthago" ("Carthage must be destroyed"), started it all,
according to Kiernan. The subsequent destruction of Carthage set the
precedent for future genocides and served as the central focus of
future civilizations’ obsession with cultural purification. Spanish
conquistadors who ravaged South and Central America, slaughtering
hundreds of New World civilizations, were weaned on the glories of
ancient Rome and the historical accounts of Livy and Plutarch. From
1565 to 1603, when England began its conquest of Irish lands, Kiernan
notes that "English expansionists linked classical accounts of the
triumphs of Rome and the disappearance of Carthage to reemerging
agrarian preconceptions of rural morality and fruitful land use." Nazi
Germany, bent on reclaiming a "primeval past" in which agricultural
and racial purity reigned supreme, developed the death camps and
ushered in a wave of modern genocides made all the more shocking by
their industrialized ease.
Along with these cults are the numerous agricultural explanations
behind much of history’s extermination policies. Often, the populations
undergoing liquidation were viewed by their oppressors as unsuitable
for cultivating the land they occupied. Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian
ideology, which championed the yeoman farmer, played a crucial role
in U.S. policies toward Native Americans. The political nature of
agriculture and its relationship with communism ignited the purges
of Stalin’s Russia and the famine that wracked China under Mao.
Kiernan’s explorations of genocide in the 19th-century Australian
Outback and the formative years of East and Southeast Asia illuminate
periods of genocidal history often overshadowed by the more mechanized
and publicized mass killings of the 20th century. He concludes his
history with the 21st-century genocide in Darfur and suggests, not
very convincingly, that Islamic terrorism is instigating a new wave of
genocidal ambitions. While al-Qaida combines "ethnoreligious violence
with territorial expansionist ambitions that resemble those of other
genocidal movements," the connection seems premature considering
that so much of this work suggests it takes the passage of time for
genocide to become fully defined as such.
Though stressing a need to cry genocide as it occurs instead of
waiting decades too late to take action, too much of Kiernan’s book
reads like a roll call of horror: a not so brief history of violence.
When the book runs the danger of becoming a monotonous recitation of
events and death tolls, however, the personalized accounts of witnesses
remind us–as all worthwhile studies of human disaster should–of the
individual human lives underneath all these millennia of collective
death and destruction.