Winnipeg Free Press , Canada
Nov 21 2009
New way to look at genocide an ungainly work
Book Reviewed by: Lionel Steiman
Worse Than War
Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity
PublicAffairs, 658 pages, $38
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
This ungainly work has many faults, the first being its length.
It is wordy and repetitive, its tone is often arrogant and omniscient,
and its author, American academic Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, is insulting
and dismissive of views with which he disagrees.
Because it presents evidence selectively, and forces it to fit
Goldhagen’s preconceptions, the book is not a trustworthy reference.
But it is also a vigorously argued effort to address a major cause of
human suffering.
Worse than War claims to offer a new way of understanding the
phenomenon of genocide, and a corresponding method of preventing or
restraining genocidal actions once they begin.
In it Goldhagen uses the interpretive frame of his controversial 1996
book on the Holocaust, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, for an analysis
of genocide in general. Goldhagen’s first book was rejected by
scholars for faulty research and interpretation, and the present work
will not likely fare any better.
That is partly because Goldhagen excludes structural and material
factors from consideration, focusing instead solely on the role of
individuals.
All genocidal assaults, he believes, are caused by individuals, who
are always motivated by ideas. Individual leaders conjure some
transformation of society which they insist requires the elimination
of an identified enemy, usually a mistrusted and hated minority.
Goldhagen calculates that in the 20th century between 125 and 175
million people were victims of mass murder, three times the number of
military and civilian deaths in all the wars of that century.
But it is often impossible to distinguish between deaths resulting
from war and those caused by genocide. Goldhagen insists a distinction
can be made, but he fails to make a clear one. This is a serious flaw
in a book whose title is Worse than War.
Goldhagen’s central concept is "eliminationism," which he prefers to
the more narrowly defined genocide. Eliminationist leaders and
politics are key to understanding the origins as well as the course of
genocide, from that of the Armenians, Jews and Cambodians, to the
so-called "ethnic cleansing" by Serbs and Croat in the Balkans, as
well as the recent assaults in Rwanda and Darfur.
There must exist a totality of beliefs, desires, ideologies, acts and
policies to make mass annihilation an actual option. Goldhagen coined
the term "eliminationism" for this totality because the term genocide
made it impossible to diagnose potentially genocidal situations.
Although he insists that his concept enables us to diagnose and deal
with situations before they escalate into full-blown genocides, his
eliminationism is too broad and amorphous a concept to serve as the
basis of concerted action by any international body.
In 1948 the United Nations defined genocide, but in a way that almost
guaranteed that intervention to stop it would never be undertaken.
Goldhagen therefore proposes a new approach, one combining prevention,
intervention and justice.
The media would drop the illusion that genocide results from a
conflict between two equal sides and would avoid such euphemisms as
"ethnic cleansing." Where political leaders commit mass murder, they
and their deeds would be labelled accordingly, even where they were
heads of state.
Bounties would be placed on the heads of any political or military
leaders pursuing eliminationist ends. The UN would no longer pamper
tyrants and other practitioners of eliminationism; it would admit only
democracies, would impose effective sanctions including armed
intervention, and would establish an effective International Court.
In Goldhagen’s view the only major remaining source of eliminationist
assaults lies in "political Islam," his term for Islamism or Islamic
fundamentalism.
Its targets are Americans and other infidels, particularly Israel and
the Jews. Goldhagen refers to Israel as a target of possible genocide
but fails to mention the Palestinians.
In the Middle East one side’s legitimate defenders are the other
side’s genocidal terrorists. How can "eliminationism" be addressed
where each side see its salvation in the disappearance of the other?
University of Manitoba historian Lionel Steiman is the author of Paths
to Genocide: Antisemitism in Western History (St. Martin’s Press,
1998).
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 21, 2009 H7
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
