A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation - Updated Edition

a century of genocide

a century of genocide

UTOPIAS OF RACE AND NATION

■   ■   ■   ■

Eric D. Weitz

with a new preface by the author

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

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Eighth paperback printing, and first paperback printing with a new preface by the author, 2015

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-16587-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930402

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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

contents

Abbreviations    vii

Preface to the New Paperback Edition    ix

An Armenian Prelude    1

introduction

Genocides in the Twentieth Century    8

chapter one

Race and Nation: An Intellectual History    16

chapter two

Nation, Race, and State Socialism: The Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin    53

chapter three

The Primacy of Race: Nazi Germany    102

chapter four

Racial Communism: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge    144

chapter five

National Communism: Serbia and the Bosnian War    190

Conclusion    236

Notes    255

Bibliography    311

Acknowledgments    339

Index    343

abbreviations

Preface to the New Paperback Edition

When I first began to write A Century of Genocide shortly before the turn into the new millennium, the effort to understand genocides in a comparative framework was still highly controversial. The Historikerstreit (historians’ quarrel) in West Germany was only a decade behind us, and its consequences still reverberated. In that heated public and academic debate, Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and many other leading lights of the German intellectual world took to task their colleague Ernst Nolte for relativizing and trivializing the Holocaust. Nolte had compared the Holocaust with the Stalinist terrors and other inhumane acts committed by communist regimes. For Nolte, the European twentieth century was defined by the communist threat. Germany rightly feared the aggressive designs of the Soviet Union. Everything the Nazis did was in response; every terror act of the Third Reich had been presaged by Stalin. The Nazis only adopted the techniques of repression forged in the Soviet Union. Nolte argued that communist regimes were even more bloodthirsty than the Third Reich, implying that the Nazis were not all that bad or at least not all that distinctive when viewed through a comparative lens.¹

Habermas and others put to rest these specious arguments of Nolte’s, which at best were based on a silly chronological determinism—the Soviets did it first, hence the Nazis only responded in kind—and at worst were a deliberate effort to call into question the enormity of the Nazi effort to annihilate the Jews and the Holocaust’s stature as a symbol of absolute evil. The broader intellectual impact, however, was deleterious. Nolte’s reprehensible diminution of the meaning of the Holocaust made it very difficult to undertake comparative analyses, since every venture into this terrain was immediately castigated as a similar relativization of the Holocaust.

Ten years on, in 1997, just when I started work on A Century of Genocide, another public and academic storm had a similar effect. Published first in France and edited by the ex-communist and ex-Maoist Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism provided intricate details about the highly repressive acts of communist regimes around the world.² That these states exercised repression and terror on a vast scale might have come as a bombshell to some French academics. In fact, the revelations were hardly new, though in the best chapters, the empirical details based on research in newly-opened Soviet and Eastern European archives were immensely interesting.³ Courtois, like Nolte, practiced history by body count. Communism had many more victims to account for, hence it was necessarily worse than Nazism. Case closed.

The impact of The Black Book, at least at first, was not to stimulate serious, systematic comparative analysis of dictatorial systems.⁴ The triumphalist tone assumed by Courtois and many of his collaborators—who often sounded like secular sinners seeking penance for their communist past—closed off the possibilities for comparison. Notably, Courtois and Nolte largely ignored the nuanced and sophisticated historical and social science studies of the Third Reich and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Increasingly, these works analyzed the internal workings of the state and state-society interactions as part of the effort to explain the repressions and terror and, in the case of the Third Reich, the genocide committed by the regimes. Instead, Nolte and Courtois engaged in polemics that masked as scholarship.

Not rarely, when I first began to present lectures based on the research I was conducting for A Century of Genocide and argued that comparative analysis was the best way to understand the prevalence of genocide in the twentieth century, I was accused of either relativizing the Holocaust à la Nolte or of parroting The Black Book with its blanket condemnation of communism. Fortunately, I was not alone in the comparative venture. In the mid-1990s a group of North American scholars had founded what is now known as the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). Their touchstone was the pioneering work of the South African-born sociologist Leo Kuper and his book, Genocide: Its Political Uses in the Twentieth Century.⁵ They published some of the first important studies of genocide as a phenomenon that applies to more than the Holocaust, and began to resurrect the scholarly work of Raphael Lemkin, the founder of the concept of genocide and the chief inspiration for the Genocide Convention that the United Nations passed in 1948. The journalist, scholar, and activist Samantha Power brought these issues into the public realm with her Pulitzer-prize winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.⁶

In these first works in the field now known as genocide studies, the major focus was on the singular nature of genocidal events, in particular their origins and implementation and the political and moral question of how they might be prevented in the future.⁷ The inspiration was often studies on the Holocaust. The wars in the former Yugoslavia with their accompanying atrocities against Bosnian Muslims and the Rwandan Genocide in the 1990s gave an added sense of urgency to the research. An extensive literature on the definitional problem arose, with various social scientists attempting to refine some of the obvious deficiencies in the Genocide Convention, like its exclusion of political or class-based killings from the definition of genocide.⁸ In the first blush of historical research, other cases were sometimes forced into a Holocaust model. This was particularly true of studies on the Armenian Genocide, in which scholars and activists seemed to think that they had to prove that the Young Turks’ annihilation of the Armenian population was just like the Holocaust in order for it to qualify as a genocide.⁹

Then, around 2000, the research took off, helped along by a panoply of newly-founded journals, conferences, and associations, notably, in addition to the IAGS, the International Network of Genocide Scholars, the Workshop on Armenian-Turkish Studies, and the Journal of Genocide Studies and other journals as far afield as Germany and Japan. We have learned an enormous amount about particular cases. The pacesetter for the research has been work on the Armenian Genocide and the genocide of the Herero and Nama of German Southwest Africa (today Namibia) between 1904 and 1908, the first two cases of the twentieth century, along with the Rwandan Genocide.¹⁰ Other, less well known cases also received attention, as has the problem of genocide prevention.¹¹ In some instances, recognition has gradually developed that the scope of victims was far greater than originally thought. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, it is now clear that Assyrians suffered a similar fate.¹² Research on the events in Anatolia in World War I has particular poignancy because the Republic of Turkey continues to deny that any genocide took place and punishes Turkish citizens who speak out on the topic.¹³ It takes courage to work on the topic, but there is now a critical mass of Turkish scholars who do so. The evidence for the genocide has become so overwhelming that the Turkish state’s protestations look increasingly like the hollowed-out communist ideology of the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union.

The importance of individual case studies cannot be overestimated. From them we learn the background, context, and implementation of deliberate mass murder. At the same time, intentionally or not, they often create the sense that these events are unique occurrences, unrelated to other forms of mass violence and to population politics generally. If other genocides were considered, it was usually in the form of the search for an original genocide that explains later ones, a links-in-the-chain kind of argument, one genocide setting the stage for another, whether the focus is on the European conquest of the Americas or the destruction of the Herero and Nama or of the Armenians and Assyrians as the prelude to the Holocaust.¹⁴ Jürgen Zimmerer made the case most strongly for the genocide of the Herero and Nama, arguing that it broke the taboo against total violence, which opened the path to the Holocaust.¹⁵ Zimmerer provoked a fierce and interesting debate; my own sense is that the evidence does not sustain the argument. But at least he challenged the then-reigning presumption among researchers that the Holocaust was unique onto itself, incomparable with any other event. That, however, is a theological or ideological position, one that closes off possibilities for discussion and analyses.

I wrote A Century of Genocide as a determined effort to break out of that constricting box; the book was (and still is) a deliberate challenge, especially to my colleagues in German History and Holocaust Studies, to think beyond the Holocaust without trivializing its enormous dimensions. Norman Naimark had already published his very important book, Fires of Hatred, in which he also placed the Holocaust in a comparative framework, so I could draw sustenance from his effort.¹⁶ Soon thereafter, Ben Kiernan published a massive study in which he argued that the thread connecting genocides from the ancient world to the present is the contestation over land and people.¹⁷ The book demonstrated great knowledge of many parts of the world, but the interpretation often seemed too general and too many cases were thrown into the mix.

Other historians and social scientists were quickly moving beyond strict comparisons by placing the phenomenon of genocide in the context of global historical developments since 1500, notably imperialism, colonialism, and nation-state formation. In so doing they brought liberal states and their colonial empires into the panoply of genocidal actors, a major and illuminating departure since previously only authoritarian states of one form or another had been considered among the perpetrators. Mark Levene, for example, has taken this position most forcefully. He has argued that the modern world of nation-states and industrial economies signifies a more highly competitive global order. Citizen loyalty is a desideratum, which makes heterogeneity—an unquestioned characteristic of empires—a dangerous condition that nation-states have sought to eliminate, sometimes by the act of genocide. As global actors, democratic regimes have also committed genocide, notably against indigenous peoples at home, as well as in colonies abroad.¹⁸

In an influential article published in 2002, A. Dirk Moses incisively critiqued both Holocaust uniqueness arguments and inflated claims of an identity between colonialism or imperialism and genocide. Moses sought to surmount the sterile debate between the two positions and called for an approach that links together nation-building, imperial competition and international and intra-national racial struggle to the ideologically driven catastrophes of the twentieth century. Such an approach, he argues, enables us to see the connections between indigenous genocides and the Holocaust and other state-centered genocides in the racial century from 1850–1950.¹⁹

Moses and others have since amplified that perspective (though he seems to have abandoned the term racial century). A number of handbooks and edited collections have forcefully drawn the connection between European expansion abroad and genocides. As Moses and Donald Bloxham write in the collection they edited, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, they aim to go beyond strictly comparative scholarship; instead, their goal is to reflect in a more rounded way upon the relationship between genocide and broader historical trends, periods, and structures.²⁰ In another edited collection, one focusing on colonialism and genocide, Moses, drawing on Patrick Wolfe, defines the deep structure of settler colonialism as a logic of elimination.²¹ For Wolfe, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. This is a powerful insight that Wolfe has deployed in a number of publications. He argues that the seizure of land, the very definition of settler colonialism, leads to a cascade of measures designed to reduce or eliminate the presence of the indigenous population, including removals to reservations, assimilation, and, sometimes, genocide. These events may occur over decades and even centuries—hence, they do not comprise a singular event, and genocide is but one possibility in an array of repressive and eliminationist measures. Working off this perspective, Moses shows that the UN definition of genocide, with its strict emphasis on intent, a stance widely seconded by scholars, limits our understanding of genocide, which may occur by white settlers acting within the overall structure of imperialism, but without the express support, indeed, sometimes against the policies of the colonial state.²²

So where are we now? We know much more about individual cases of genocide around the globe. In North America, courses on genocide are available at many, perhaps most, colleges and universities. A small library of handbooks, encyclopedias, and compilations exist that enable any interested reader to get a good sense of the field of genocide studies.²³

A Century of Genocide helped develop the field by offering a tightly structured comparative analysis of four cases, the Stalinist Soviet Union, the Holocaust, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and the former Yugoslavia. That allowed me to present readers with the details of each case within a common framework. In each chapter I deliberately combined more objective analysis with a section on the experience of genocide drawn from memoirs, literature, and trial transcripts because I believed (and still do) that alongside explaining genocides, one has to convey the sheer brutality and horror that people experience as victims. The book has been criticized for overemphasizing ideology and revolution as the causative factors in genocides.²⁴ I stand by the analysis in the cases I studied, but not necessarily for every genocide that has unfolded in the modern world. The research since around 2000 has made it clear that a panoply of issues may cause genocide, though a number of factors seem always to be present: an exclusionary ideology that defines a particular group as unworthy, even sub-human, and threatening; a crisis of the political and social order that enhances the competition for resources and the sense of insecurity among the dominant group; and war, which erases the bounds of normal human interaction and creates a culture that permits excessive violence.²⁵

The comparative method I adopted in A Century of Genocide has had few successors. More typical has been the global historical approach adopted by Mark Levene and others. They have sometimes cast their net too widely, leaving the impression that the modern world is genocidal in nature, rather than analyzing genocides as one possibility among the broader set of state policies directed at particular racial, national, or religious groups.²⁶ That sense is only accentuated when the historical discussions remain ensconced in a field labeled genocide studies, with the requisite array of journals, associations, and conferences.

Nonetheless, Levene, Wolfe, Moses, Bloxham, and others have significantly advanced our understanding of genocides by placing them within the structural features of modernity, rather than studying the phenomenon as a unique moral and political failing exercised only by authoritarian states. To the extent that some of the work has focused on settler colonialism, they have also demonstrated how eliminationist strategies have long term impacts. In that regard, they have pointed the way toward an integrated history of genocide, one that explains its origins, implementation, and aftermath.

Most recently, human rights has emerged as a vibrant field of historical study.²⁷ Strangely, there has been little interaction between the two fields even though they are linked through their focus on discrete populations. Genocides signify that certain categories of people are denied even the basic right to life. Human rights regimes are about the way categories of people—white and black, men and women, citizens and non-citizens—obtain or are denied access to rights. In the future, these two virtually distinct scholarly fields will be enriched by exploring the relationship between rights and repressions.

Our knowledge of particular cases and the analytical framework in which to situate them have advanced greatly since the original publication of A Century of Genocide. To think with and beyond the Holocaust no longer immediately arouses suspicions and a barrage of criticism. A Century of Genocide helped make these developments possible. It has been read by historians and social scientists, undergraduate and graduate students, and a broader public. I hope their successors will continue to read it even as the field of study develops dramatically. Sadly, the motivating ideal of its founders, the belief that knowledge of past genocides will help prevent future occurrences, seems as far from realization as ever. But everyone who researches, writes, and lectures about genocides has to hope that somehow, sometime, the accumulation of knowledge will have a real-world impact and contribute to making genocide a part of the human past, not its present and future.

NOTES TO THE PREFACE

1. For a compilation of documents in English, see Peter Baldwin, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate (Boston: Beacon, 1990). Even some notable historians outside of Germany were swayed by Nolte, as in François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, French original 1995), and François Furet and Ernst Nolte, Fascisme et communisme (Paris: Plon, 1998). See my critical review of Passing of an Illusion in American Historical Review 105:3 (2000): 884–85.

2. Stéphane Courtois, ed., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, French original 1997). See my review essay, "Race, Nation, Class: Das Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus und das Problem des Vergleichs zwischen Nationalsozialistischen und Sowjetischen Verbrechen," WerkstattGeschichte 22 (July 1999): 75–91.

3. The most fruitful contributions were provided by Nicolas Werth, A State Against its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the Soviet Union, 33–268, and Jean-Louis Margolin, China: A Long March into Night, 463–546.

4. A wave of more serious comparative studies of the two major European dictatorships has since appeared. Among the most interesting is Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

5. Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Uses in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).

6. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic, 2002).

7. See, for example, Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: The Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, Current Sociology 38:1 (1990): 1–126; and Frank Chalk and Kurt Johanasson, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

8. See Fein, Genocide, and Chalk and Johanasson, History and Sociology of Genocide. Good surveys of the issues are in Martin Shaw, Sociology and Genocide, and Scott Straus, Political Science and Genocide in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Oxford Universtiy Press, 2010), 142–62 and 163–81.

9. For example, Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, 3rd ed. (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997), and idem, German Responsibility in the Armenian Genocide: A Review of the Historical Evidence of German Complicity (Watertown, MA: Blue Crane, 1996). For a recent, thoughtful exchange on the role of Holocaust research on genocide studies, see the forum on Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), in Journal of Genocide Research 13:1–2 (2011): 107–52.

10. The literatures on all these cases are now too large to provide complete citations. Among the most important on the Armenian Genocide are, Ronald G. Suny, They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015); Taner Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Fatma Müge Göçek, Norman M. Naimark, and Ronald G. Suny, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Raymond H. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011, French original 2006); Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Major earlier works are by Dadrian, Armenian Genocide, and Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2003); idem, ed., The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992); and idem, ed., The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1986).

On the genocide of the Herero and Nama, see Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner: Staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia (Münster: Lit, 2002); Gesine Krüger, Kriegsbewältigung und Geschichtsbewußtsein: Realität, Deutung und Verarbeitung des deutschen Kolonialkriegs in Namibia 1904 bis 1907 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999); Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923 (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); and Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, eds., Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2003). See also the important republication with an excellent introduction, Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia. An Annotated Reprint of the 1918 Blue Book, ed. Jan-Bart Gewald and Jeremy Silvester (Leiden: Brill, 2003). For older, still valuable accounts, see Helmut Bley, South-West Africa under German Rule, 1894–1914, trans. Hugh Ridley (1968; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Horst Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (1884–1915), trans. Bernd Zöllner (1966; London: Zed, 1980); and Jon M. Bridgman, The Revolt of the Hereros (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

On Rwanda, see Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999). On the broader history of the Great Lakes region and its genocides, see the many works of René Lemarchand, notably, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), and Burundi: Ethnocide as Discourse and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), who provides a much more complex picture of precolonial and colonial social relations. His analysis is superior to Mamdani’s.

11. For the latter, see especially, Geoffrey Robinson, If You Leave Us Here We Will Die: How Genocide was Stopped in East Timor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). The study of national and international tribunals has been particularly important even when the writ of some of the tribunals does not extend to genocide. See David Scheffer, All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), and Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (New York: Norton, 2011).

12. David Gaunt, Massacre, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006), and idem, Failed Identity and the Assyrian Genocide, in Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands, Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 317–33.

13. See Fatma Müge Göçek, Reading Genocide: Turkish Historiography on 1915, in A Question of Genocide, Göçek, Naimark, and Suny, eds., 42–52.

14. On the Southwest Africa-Holocaust link, see Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 2011), whose various writings on the topic have initiated a broad ranging discussion, especially in Germany. For incisive critical assessment with an excellent guide to the extensive literature, see Thomas Kühne, Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities, Journal of Genocide Research 15:3 (2013): 339–62. More affirmatively, see Richard H. King and Dan Stone, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2007).

On the link between the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, see especially, Wolfgang Gust, Die Verdrängung des Völkermords an den Armeniern—ein Signal für die Shoah, in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik Schaller, eds. (Zürich: Chronos, 2002), 463–80; Dadrian, History of the Armenian Genocide; idem, German Responsibility; and Christoph Dinkel, German Officers and the Armenian Genocide, Armenian Review 44:1 (1991): 77–133.

On Native American genocides and the Holocaust, see Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), and David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

More recently, the emphasis on connections is a result of the intellectual history spadework carried out by A. Dirk Moses and others, which has revealed that Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the term, had a broader understanding of genocide than that ultimately inscribed in the United Nations Genocide Convention. Lemkin argued for a definition that included cultural genocide, such that the destruction of a group’s life circumstances could be characterized as genocide, and he defined instances of colonial massacres as genocides. See the issue of Journal of Genocide Research 15:3 (2013), which is devoted to Lemkin.

15. Zimmmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz?

16. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

17. Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

18. Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, 2 vols. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), and idem, The Crisis of Genocide, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). See also the forum on Levene’s first two volumes in Journal of Genocide Research 9:1 (2007): 113–33, and another forum on the latter two volumes forthcoming in the same journal.

19. A. Dirk Moses, Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the ‘Racial Century’: Genocides of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust, Patterns of Prejudice 36:4 (2002): 9–36, quotations 33.

20. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 8. See also Donald Bloxham, Genocide, World Wars and the Unweaving of Euorpe (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008), a collection of his articles, which does a good job of situating genocides and other forms of population politics in the broad context of European and Eurasian history, thereby going beyond the singular-event approach, from the latter third of the nineteenth century to 1945. For the more conventional approach, see Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop, The Genocide Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009). Moses and Bloxham are also well represented in the recent edited collection, Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe, Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), which makes a forceful argument for situating all sorts of violent acts in a long twentieth-century starting around 1870. Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), is stronger on the definitional debates and the historiography of particular cases.

21. A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History, in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. idem (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 3–48, quotations 30, 32. See also A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, eds., Colonialism and Genocide (London: Routledge, 2007).

22. See Patrick Wolfe, Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide, in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, A. Dirk Moses, ed. (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 102–32, quotation 103, as well as Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999); idem, Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race, American Historical Review 106:3 (2001): 866–905; and idem, Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006): 387–409. For Moses, see especially Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History, in idem, Empire, Colony, Genocide, 3–54. For Wolfe’s reservations about Moses’s appropriation of his coinage, see Wolfe, Structure and Event, 104–105. For a discussion of Raphael Lemkin’s understanding of genocide, including the centrality of colonialism to his view, see also John Docker, Are Settler-Colonies Inherently Genocidal? in Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide, 81–101.

23. Notably, Jens Meierhenrich, Genocide: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Bloxham and Moses, Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies; and Stone, Historiography of Genocide. A good introduction is, Martin Shaw, What is Genocide? (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2007).

24. For example, Scott Straus, Second-Generation Comparative Research on Genocide, World Politics 59:3 (2007): 476–501, and reviews by Michael Geyer in American Historical Review 112:1 (2007): 168–69, and Mark Levene in Slavonic and East European Review 82:3 (2004): 779–81.

25. For a more developed perspective, see Gregory H. Stanton, The Ten Stages of Genocide, http://genocidewatch.org/genocide/tenstagesofgenocide.html.

26. Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, and Dominik J. Schaller, From Conquest to Genocide: Colonial Rule in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa, in Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide, 296–324.

27. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). For other important recent works on human rights, see Jan Eckel and Samuel Moyn, eds., Moral für die Welt? Menschenrechtspolitik in den 1970er Jahren (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012); Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock, eds., The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ed., Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; German original, 2010). For a spirited defense of a strictly political definition of human rights, see Aryeh Neier, The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Somewhat between the newer and older historiography is Roger Nomand and Sarah Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN: The Political History of Universal Justice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).

An Armenian Prelude

Johannes Lepsius was a German missionary with decades of experience in the Ottoman Empire. In 1916, in the middle of World War I, he wrote a confidential report that circulated within the ministries in Berlin. Despite its top secret billing, the report quickly became known outside government circles. The oldest people of Christianity, Lepsius wrote, is in danger of being annihilated.¹ Some months earlier, the American consul in Aleppo, Syria, J. B. Jackson, had written to his superior, Henry Morgenthau, American ambassador in Istanbul (Constantinople), describing fearsome scenes:

Men and boys have been deported from their homes in great numbers and disappeared en route, and later on the women and children have been made to follow. For some time stories have been prevalent from travelers arriving from the interior of the killing of the males, of the great numbers of bodies along the roadsides, and the floating in the Euphrates river; of the delivery to the Kurds by the gendarmes accompanying the convoys of women and children … of unthinkable outrages committed by gendarmes and Kurds, and even the killing of many of the victims. At first these stories were not given much credence, but as many of the refugees are now arriving in Aleppo, no doubt longer remains of the truth of the matter.²

The issue, Jackson noted, is nothing less than the extermination of the Armenian race.³

Lepsius and Jackson were describing a genocide. The word did not yet exist, but both of them knew that they were witnessing something even worse than the pogromlike violence that had occurred earlier against Armenians. What they could not know, of course, was that the genocide of Armenians, one of the first of the twentieth century, displayed so many of the characteristics that would be replicated at other times and in other places around the globe, including Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and the former Yugoslavia, the four cases explored in detail in this book.⁴ As in the genocides that would follow, the forced deportations and direct killings of Armenians were so widespread and systematic that they could have been organized only by a state with a clearly defined goal—to eliminate entirely a particular population that it viewed as a threat to its grand political ambitions. In each of these cases, a regime, partly out of desperation, partly because of utopian visions, seized the opportunity presented by war and severe internal crisis to transform dramatically the very composition of the population within its domain. To accomplish its goals, it relied on the security organs of the state but also mobilized broad segments of the population, which became complicit in the killings.

But modern genocides do not happen just because a particular regime wills them into existence. They are the result of political decisions executed at moments of crisis, but they are also embedded in complex historical processes, notably, the emergence in the modern world of race and nation as the primary categories of political and social organization. The Ottoman Empire—to return to the specific example—was once a vital, dynamic power. At its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman dynasty ruled a vast expanse of territory in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. As with most early modern empires, never for a moment did its rulers think that all of their subjects had to possess the same religion or nationality. The empire was, by definition, multireligious and multinational. True, Christians and Jews were subordinated to Muslims, but they were also protected, and their communities were granted extensive autonomy. But by World War I, the Ottoman Empire had been battered for at least a century by encroachments of its Christian subjects in Europe, many of whom had won autonomy or outright independence; by internal disarray and corruption; and by competition from the new dynamic nation-states of Europe, whose powers rested upon the great wealth produced by industrial economies, colonial empires abroad, and complex but rational and efficient government bureaucracies.

From the 1830s onward, the Ottoman Empire had undergone various reform efforts, none of which had succeeded. In 1908 officers associated with the Committee for Union and Progress overthrew the dynasty that had ruled the empire for six centuries. Like the sultans before them, the Young Turk rulers of the late Ottoman Empire were groping for a formula that would help them revive the glory of the past in the vastly altered modern world of European hegemony. They sought various ways to restructure the empire, and among the programs on the palette of possibilities was nationalism. They also admired the prowess of the German military, whose officers, beginning in the late nineteenth century, helped train the soldiers of the Ottoman Empire. Among Westerners, Germans came to have privileged access to the Ottoman rulers, especially following the Young Turk revolution in 1908.

After the failure of the various reform efforts, nationalism seemed to be one of the formulas that might enable the Young Turks to create a new, vital empire, one that could unite Turkic peoples from Europe to Asia Minor to Central Asia. From their imagined view of modern Germany and modern France, the Young Turks understood nationalism as a key to the creation of a strong, powerful state that would be able to harness and mobilize the energies of the united people—for warfare to protect the integrity of the territory, for development to build the economy and culture and thereby create a lively, dynamic society that would be at least the equal of those of western Europe.

By World War I, Turkey was an empire in the throes of becoming a nation-state. In the conception of its rulers, the new state would be populated by an exclusive, homogeneous, Turkish population. That process immediately threatened the myriad of non-Turkic peoples in the empire, and no population was so endangered as the Armenians. Armenians were, after all, a people with a long history and culture, a powerful sense of their identity as descendants of the members of the first state to adopt Christianity (in 301). Like many minorities, they occupied important positions in the economy and professions, even though the vast majority of Armenians were peasants. Through the nineteenth century the Ottomans had endured the successful revolts of other Christian groups, including Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgars. With the backing of more powerful European states, these people had pushed the Ottomans nearly completely out of Europe. Since the 1870s, some Armenians had become politically active, shedding the subject people’s mentality that had led them, for centuries, to pursue improvements in their conditions by appeals to the sultan. No less than the Young Turks, they came into contact with European ideas and movements—not via military advisers and diplomats, however, but in schools established by European and American missionaries and by travels to Paris and London and other European capitals. Impressed with the vigor and possibilities of nineteenth-century developments, they began to demand greater autonomy and political rights within the empire.

Ottoman rulers viewed the political activism of some Armenians as a serious security danger, especially in light of the shrinkage of Ottoman rule in Europe from the 1820s onward. Moreover, the Armenians’ historic homeland stood right in the middle of an imagined pan-Turkish state. For Ottomans considering the road to Turkish nationalism, Armenians came to be seen as the great threat. Already in the 1890s massacres had erupted with the connivance of the authorities and had resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians. While horrific and tragic, these were still largely traditional forms of violence, much like pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire, though on a vastly greater scale.

The Ottoman Empire’s entrance into World War I raised the stakes dramatically. Germany pledged to its Ottoman ally that the empire would remain intact—even extend further at the expense of Russia—and that the coffers of Germany’s powerful state and economy would be opened to it. On the basis of these promises and of its fear of further Russian intrusions, the Ottoman Empire joined the hostilities in November 1914. In the Balkan Wars that had immediately preceded the outbreak of the Great War, the Ottoman Empire had lost more territory and peoples in Europe, a blow whose impact can hardly be underestimated. Now the first total war in history—and the Ottomans entered the hostilities when the war’s revolutionary character should have been clear—meant for the Young Turk rulers either heady success, the reconstitution of a Greater Turkish state, or utter catastrophe. The beginnings were not auspicious, with some disastrous military encounters. Increasingly, the rulers began searching for internal enemies—in total war, internal security was as vital as the army’s defenses. Armenians, with cross-border ties to conationals in the Russian Empire, quickly became a target. More important—and as with so many other cases of genocide in the twentieth century—war provided the Young Turks with the opportunity to refashion drastically the very character of the population. The emergency circumstances of wartime and the heightened fears all meant that the rulers felt liberated to carry out extreme measures that they would not dare venture in peacetime. War provided the cover, but war also provided the great opportunity. If it all worked out, the Young Turks would rule a vastly expanded territory that would be purged of its alien populations, the Armenians chief among them.

The procedures began quickly after the empire’s entrance into World War I. In February 1915 an order went out for the disarming of all Armenians. Since thousands of Armenian men were serving in the Ottoman army, this meant that they had to be forced out of the regular ranks, their weaponry taken from them, their status reduced to that of laborers. Groups of them were often summarily shot. Civilians also had their weapons taken from them. Then the government began deporting entire civilian populations. It issued the first order of deportation on 8 April 1915, and more extensive ones followed the next month. Typically, Ottoman officials separated men from women and children. Large numbers of men were executed outright, while the women and children were sent out on the long march from their homelands across the desert to Iraq and Syria. The only food and water they had was what they could carry, and sometimes even that was stolen from them. On the marches the columns were set upon by marauding bands, and the gendarmes accompanying the Armenians often joined in the depredations. Many thousands succumbed to starvation and beatings; others were summarily killed. The Young Turks also targeted leaders of the Armenian community. On the evening of 23/24 April 1915, in Istanbul, they rounded up scores of Armenian intellectuals, politicians, educators, and priests, who were deported inland and then executed. Similar measures were taken against notables in localities all over Armenia.⁵ Churches were destroyed, names of villages and streets changed. As with the other genocides that would follow, the perpetrators sought to eliminate not just the presence of a people but their past as well.⁶

All over Armenia, the pattern described by Lepsius and Jackson prevailed—entire villages given an hour to gather what they could, then sent on the road, families often separated, small children left behind in the chaos. Armenians endured burnings with hot iron and continual beatings. Men and woman had their hair and nails ripped out. Countless thousands of women and girls were raped. By the time the columns of desperate refugees reached Aleppo, Baghdad, and other safe havens, half their members had been killed directly or had succumbed to the exactions they suffered, and the survivors were mostly women and small children.⁷ Probably around a million Armenians out of a population of approximately 2.1 million were killed, a devastatingly large proportion of the population.⁸

If the experience of extreme deprivation and death was chaotic—no one in the columns of refugees knew when they might be set upon; survival was usually a matter of chance—there was most definitely an overall structure to the events. From the extensive reports, Lepsius concluded, correctly, that

[t]he deportations were ordered and carried out by the central government in Constantinople. Such extensive measures covering such a vast area cannot have had any kind of accidental and uncontrollable origins.⁹

The Young Turk rulers had indeed ordered the deportations and had them organized by the Interior and War Ministries, which they commanded directly.¹⁰ Alongside their regular troops and gendarmes, Ottoman military and civilian officials then mobilized into action extra forces, like Kurdish bands and the local party organizations of the Committee of Union and Progress. According to Morgenthau, minister of war Enver Pasha reacted with indignation when Morgenthau tactfully suggested that the violence against Armenians had not been ordered by the government, and that its subordinates had taken matters into their own hands. We have this country absolutely under control, Enver told him. "I have no desire to shift the blame