The New Republic
October 8, 2007
The Death That Will Not Die
by Michael Ignatieff
Pg. 51
Michael Ignatieff is a member of parliament in the House of Commons
of Canada and deputy leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from
Sparta to Darfur
By Ben Kiernan
(Yale University Press, 768 pp., $40)
A history of genocide is bound to leave a reader with gloomy and
misanthropic reflections. This world history of genocide from Sparta
to Darfur is no exception. Apparently, we humans will set about
exterminating each other whenever we have the means, the motive, and
the hope of success. This grand cruelty is one of the defining
features of our common humanity, in addition to wisdom, dignity,
compassion, and all the rest. Ben Kiernan has provided the most
extensive history of our genocidal propensities that I have ever
read. He starts his history early, with Roman and Greek massacres of
barbarians, and works through the Spanish conquest of the Americas,
the exterminating vigor of American settlers toward Indians, the
Turkish way with the Armenians, the German way with the Jews,
Stalin’s way with the Ukrainians, the Khmer Rouge’s way with the
Cambodians, the Serbs’ way with the Muslims, the Hutus’ way with the
Tutsis, and the Sudanese way with the Darfurians.
If you want to know how it was done, where and when it was done, and
how many victims there were, Kiernan has the answers. This is a
formidable and important book. I am less certain, however, that
Kiernan has gotten to the root of the question that raises the issue
of misanthropy: namely, why we do this to our own kind with such
lamentable enthusiasm and self-righteousness. We have been asking
this question since we began killing each other, but we have also
been trying to stop, and our attempts to rein in our genocidal
propensities go some way toward redeeming our honor as a species.
Many of our best institutions–the constitutional state, for example,
and its guarantees of equal rights for all–are prudential responses
by wise men and women to their discovery of our predilections for
massacre if we are left unconstrained. Responding to the challenge of
genocide was a prime motivation for the new institutions created
after 1945: the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, the Genocide Convention, the International Criminal Court,
the state of Israel, and so on. The social harmony achieved in
western democracies since 1945 is an achievement in the face of the
horror left behind by genocidal ideology. If we now praise
multiculturalism and make a virtue out of the fact that people of
different races, religions, languages, and cultures live together in
most if not all democracies, it is because we take this as a rebuke
to a disgraced alternative: one land for one people, to be achieved,
if necessary, by slaughter.
Any history of genocide has to be balanced with the history of our
halting attempts to take the measure of this propensity in ourselves
and to set up dikes, institutional and moral, against the temptation.
At the same time, we have to recognize how far we still have to go
before we get the terrible temptation under control. The creators of
the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
assumed that juridical denunciation and proscription of the crime
would reduce the human propensity to commit the deed. But still the
killings go on, even as the International Criminal Court and many
states have enacted penalties against genocide and, in the cases of
Rwanda and Bosnia, secured the first convictions. So the crime has
been proscribed morally, and enforcement measures improve, and yet it
continues apace. The abandon with which mass killing continues
suggests that something is not sufficient about the judicial response
to the crime.
It would be ridiculous to belittle the attempts we have made to bring
genocidal killers to courts of law. There are good reasons to bring
killers to justice even if we cannot be sure that doing so will
reduce the propensity of others to kill. We seek justice against
genocide to demonstrate that the victims matter, that their memory is
sacred to us, that we stand always with them and never with their
butchers. This symbolic function of the judicial response to genocide
is always and everywhere valuable. Yet it does not change the fact
that judicial responses–attempting to increase the certainty of
punishment–do not appear to mitigate the human propensity to resort
to extermination as a final solution. One of the crucial explanatory
puzzles in the history of genocide, one that Kiernan does not
actually address, is why, in the post-1945 period at least, the
universal authoritative de-legitimation of genocide has failed. Even
at this late date, after all that we know, it remains a regular
feature of world politics.
We should work ourselves free of the fantasy, dear to international
lawyers and human rights activists, that we will someday live in a
world where international law succeeds in extirpating genocide and
mass killing. Instead of betting on justice to get the better of
genocide, we ought to wager instead on a range of other options: the
spread of development and democracy; the entrenchment of
constitutional freedoms in as many countries as possible; population
limitation; universal education; measures to control climate change.
(Why climate change? Because, as Darfur seems to prove, share
conflicts over resources are being made worse by desertification and
climate change. Global warming will inflame genocidal propensities
wherever human groups are under intensifying environmental pressure
on scarce resources of water, food, and land.)
Understanding how all these measures might help is important. But it
is also important to understand the rationale, the logic, even the
seductiveness of genocide as an instrument of politics. The crime of
genocide is a big crime, and so it needs big reasons for it to be
committed. Those who do the butchering, shooting, or gassing need
powerful ideological aromatics to overcome the revulsion, horror,
pity, and sympathy that invariably arise when we see one of our own
kind being killed. It is too simple to regard the perpetrators as
merely de-humanized: the perplexity is rather that they are human but
do it anyway. Ideology is the handmaiden of all genocides, because
instinctual revulsion toward the act is bound to be strong in all but
the most sadistic perpetrators. Since there are never quite enough of
these, there must be arguments and symbols and myths capable of
recruiting other, less brutal accomplices to bring about what is
always a large-scale operation, requiring many willing hands.
Kiernan’s major argument about these ideological justifications–the
"blood and soil" of his title–is that the genocidal project, whether
under the Romans or the Rwandans, begins with the fantasy of a piece
of land belonging exclusively to a people of a certain blood
relation. This fantasy appeals to the idea of human identity
according to which people can only be truly who they are if their
culture and their traditions are connected to a particular soil, and
if they possess this soil to the exclusion of everyone else. The
project is always a fantasy, because invariably the land in question
is inhabited by someone else. Zion is never empty. Paradise is never
unoccupied. Eden is never vacant. Anyone seeking to create Zion,
Paradise, or Eden on earth must figure out what to do with the
inconvenient fact that there are others already there, others who
came before you. Those people are real human beings, with equally
strong attachments to the land. They are, moreover, just as human as
you, and therefore just as resistant to change as you know yourself
to be.
For this reason, someone wishing to build Paradise on earth comes to
realize that there are only four options: live with the people who
stand in the way, educate and assimilate them, drive them out, or
exterminate them. Genocide is best understood, then, as the fourth
and most radically ruthless consequence of utopian political fantasy.
Kiernan captures this idea very well:
Racism becomes genocidal when perpetrators imagine a world without
certain kinds of people in it. A similar metaphysic marks some other
forms of idealist thinking and action: the rejection of a real
historical community or a retreat from everyday life in favor of an
imagined vision or idea. Pastoralism is a related ideal in that it
often eliminates inhabitants from a landscape.
Paradise, when seen through the eyes of an exterminator, is a world
without fear, without anxiety, without threat from others. Paradise
is paradise because only you and I are in it and we are both the
same. The serpent in Paradise is the others. Faced with them,
genocidal extremists will then lay hold of racial stereotypes to
create the basis for the thought that these people do not deserve to
be on the land, and from there it is not far to thinking that they do
not deserve to live. Genocide is a form of politics in the service of
a vision of Paradise. It is a form of nation-building, if you will–a
type of violence that is ultimately an instrument of the most
powerful utopia men have ever created for themselves: a world without
enemies.
I would not present this as a universal typology of genocides.
Kiernan makes it clear that there are a variety of motives and
situations in which mass exterminations occur. There is no point in
pouring all the forms of genocide into one unwieldy classification.
Yet it is worth insisting that genocide be seen as a darkly seductive
form of nation-building or community-formation, driven by the fantasy
of a world without enemies. This is what makes genocide such a
recurring temptation: it appeals to very deep-seated human desires to
live in security and peace with your own.
If this helps us to understand why so many human groups have
succumbed to the genocidal temptation, it is important also to stress
that many human groups do not succumb at all. After all, not everyone
thinks of the other as an enemy. Judenrein societies–places where
the other is driven out or killed–remain the exception rather than
the rule. Cohabitation between races and religions is as frequent in
history as enforced mono-ethnicity. Let copulation thrive,
Shakespeare said, and when it does, the barriers between races,
peoples, and languages come down.
While genocide remains a possible solution to the problem of dealing
with people different than yourself, it is not the only possible
solution. Human beings throughout the ages have refused to fear the
other, and found the other enticing and appealing, and sought to bed
the other and to learn from the other–and to exploit the other, of
course, but also to change in interaction with the other. A theory of
genocide has to explain the extremists, but it also has to explain
those who refuse the extreme. A theory of genocide, to have any
explanatory power, must explain why genocide occurs in some
situations and why it does not in others.
Consider a particular case, the European settlement of North America.
The pattern was not universally genocidal. The encounter between
Europeans and aboriginals began in fear, developed into curiosity,
flourished in mutual aid and learning, curdled into suspicion,
exploded into war, and only then–and not always–ended in genocidal
fury. Only extremists believed, at any given moment, that the only
solution to the presence of the Indians was wholesale extermination.
In many contexts of white-Indian interaction, the pattern was "live
and let live." When extremists arose claiming that "live and let
live" was impossible, reasonable voices were raised to contest the
exterminatory logic of the extremists. Kiernan cites a wonderful
example of this. In 1763, after conflict between settlers and Indians
in Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin wrote a telling rebuttal of the
arguments that he must have been hearing all around him in favor of a
genocidal reprisal against Indians:
If an Indian injures me, … does it follow that I may revenge that
Injury on all Indians? It is well known that Indians are of different
Tribes, Nations and Languages, as well as the White People. In
Europe, if the French, who are White People, should injure the Dutch,
are they to revenge it on the English, because they too are white
People? The only crime of these poor Wretches seems to have been,
that they had a reddish-brown Skin, and black Hair; and some People
of that Sort, it seems, had murdered some of our Relations. If it be
right to kill Men for such a Reason, then, should any Man, with a
freckled Face and red Hair, kill a Wife or Child of mine, it would be
right for me to revenge it, by killing all the freckled red Haired
Men, Women and Children.
If Franklin was able to see through the contemptible non sequiturs
lurking in the exterminatory rhetoric on the frontier, more humble
Americans could have done so as well. If genocide is a fantasy,
requiring violent actions to force reality to approximate some
desired state of ethnic cleanliness, only some people fall for the
fantasy; others see through it clearly. Kiernan has much to say about
perpetrators, but he says very little about opponents, such as
Franklin, who raised their voices against the genocidal fantasy.
Only some dreams of blood and soil end in exterminatory violence.
Others end in inter-ethnic accommodation and varieties of
nationalism. Hostility between groups who compete for land and
resources does not always end in massacre. We need to understand why
multi-ethnic cooperation is as much the rule of human life as
genocide. Kiernan’s catalogue of nightmarish events would have had
more capacity to help us to predict (though history is hardly an
exact science) the situations in which genocidal fantasy turns deadly
if he had dealt with the cases where the most fearsome elements of
our nature were defeated by the best.
Kiernan’s learned misanthropic story also scants the interesting and
dire question of how survivors of extermination manage to live on
afterward. Perhaps this question lies beyond the bounds of the task
he set for himself; but still it is a fact that no genocides are
ever, strictly speaking, complete. There are always survivors, and
how they survive–how, indeed, they often triumph over their
perpetrators–is an important theme in any history of genocide. In
this regard, Kiernan might find it interesting to reflect on Jonathan
Lear’s luminous book Radical Hope, a philosophical study of the
memoirs of an American Crow Indian chief. This leader lived through
the actual end, between 1850 and 1880, of his nomadic civilization.
Genocidal massacre by settlers was part of the fatal destiny of the
Crow, but only a part. What the settlers failed to do was finally
accomplished by warfare with the Sioux, and microbial devastation at
the hand of disease, and finally cantonment in reservations.
Lear asks a fundamental question: how do survivors of civilizational
catastrophes such as genocide manage so often to preserve the memory
of what has been destroyed, to rebuild their civilizations, and, in
so doing, to write the history that vindicates them and not their
tormentors? Hitler is condemned to eternal infamy, while those he
tormented have been redeemed by the tireless work of human
remembrance. To the question of why survivors of extermination are so
extraordinarily tenacious, Lear answers that human beings have a
specific capacity to retain hope in the face of the loss of all that
they hold dear. He calls this "radical hope," the human capacity to
imagine the conditions of survival, for oneself and for one’s
traditions, even when no survival, no afterwards, seems conceivable.
The Crow chief whose memoir Lear analyzes did not know how his people
would survive the white man’s coming, but he knew that they would
survive. Guided by this hope, he led his people into a future neither
he nor they could possibly imagine. History has vindicated them, as
it has vindicated so many survivors of slaughter and devastation. The
Crow live on; their culture endures. So do many of the other peoples
visited with exterminatory zeal. They have lived to have the last
word because they have proved capable of radical hope. Any history of
genocide that does not include a mention of radical hope is not being
true to the unfathomable duality of human beings, their capacity for
exterminatory fantasy and their ability to keep on hoping when all
hope is gone.