Searching for the Roots of Mass Murder
ROSENFELD, GAVRIEL
Searching for the Roots of Mass Murder A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation By Eric D. Weitz Princeton. 360 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Gavriel Rosenfeld Assistant professor of...
...the dead body had also to be desacralized...
...Take the major issue of what qualifies as "genocide...
...After talking in his Introduction about the term's complexity, he accepts the United Nations' quite broad official definition of it as "the intent to destroy 'in whole or in part' a population defined by race, nationality, religion, or ethnicity...
...And the difference is an indication of how the expansiveness of the current definition of genocide can complicate the task of historical comparison...
...But in all of the cases here achieving Utopian perfection entailed purging dangerous enemies, whether defined in racial or class/national terms...
...difference...
...But the author does not merely function as a distanced social scientist...
...Where did the Utopian impulse come from...
...the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime's massacre of non-Khmer nationals like the Vietnamese, Chinese and Chams...
...Yet impressive as Weitz' analysis of the common elements of mass killing is, it is also marked by certain inconsistencies that relate to the deeper problems of genocide as a conceptual tool...
...Long before race and nationnotions existed, the impulse to create utopia in and of itself showed signs of a totalitarian potential...
...Something metaphysically exceptional colored the Nazis' obsessive and delusional views of the Jews, and Weitz' approach misses this critical dimension...
...The Soviet and Serbian deeds may now be legally certifiable acts of genocide, but they are substantially different from the Nazis'extermination of 6 million Jews or the Khmer Rouge's annihilation of nearly 20 per cent of Cambodia's population...
...This enables the author to identify as key genocide ingredients "ideologies of race and nation, revolutionary regimes with vast Utopian ambitions, [and] moments of crisis generated by war and domestic upheaval...
...Finally, he explores the ritualistic and symbolic dimensions of genocide—for instance, by describing how Khmer Rouge soldiers frequently engaged in cannibalism (eating the livers of their victims...
...The many gut-wrenching eyewitness accounts of horrifying acts that he has gathered remind readers of how individual victims perceived events that consumed untold millions...
...Each case is examined in four successive chapters structured to underscore common elements...
...he also chronicles the everyday experience of mass killing...
...In every case, he concludes, "it was not enough to kill...
...Why has it so often become transmogrified into its dystopian other...
...Weitz' third ingredient for genocide—"moments of crisis generated by war and domestic upheaval"—touches on its setting: An intense crisis in the midst of a war, he found, created the climate for suspending the universal codes of morality...
...Did the Soviets engage in genocide...
...To be sure, not until it was supplemented by the modern concepts of race and nation did the Utopian impulse produce the murderous force of the 20th century...
...Weitz discusses four concrete cases: the Soviet Union's wholesale deportation of selected ethnic groups, such as the Chechens and Tatars, during World War II...
...The major differences among the cases Weitz presents are particularly apparent when he tries to fit the Holocaust into his search for the common aspects of genocide...
...Weitz cites his familiarity with Communism (he has written extensively on the history of Left-wing politics in Germany) and his lack of expertise in African and Near Eastern history as reasons for such omissions...
...Weitz asks, and revealingly answers only that they "engaged in some genocidal actions...
...The model of perfection varied, to be sure, assuming a racial form in Nazi Germany and Communist forms in the Soviet Union, Cambodia and Yugoslavia...
...Similarly, his classifying the barbarities in the Yugoslav civil war as genocide largely rests on the UN's description of the Serbs murdering some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians at Srebenica...
...Then a combination of initiatives, some emanating from central authorities and others from local officials on the ground, triggered the merciless population transfers, torture and outright massacres...
...His largely convincing work, though, is not free of a problem endemic to the field of genocide studies—namely, a tendency to elide the substantial distinctions that exist among the various instances of wholesale killing...
...Weitz describes how Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, and Slobodan Milosevic were driven by an underlying desire to construct perfect societies...
...True, recent scholarship claims that the Holocaust can be seen through the prism of "rational" Nazi population policies in Eastern Europe (i.e...
...An inclination toward oppression is visible as far back as the strictly regimented social planning of Thomas More's 1516 book, Utopia (which includes references to forced population transfers...
...This is a leitmotif throughout his book, but does not receive the same kind of genealogical treatment he accords race and nation...
...Nevertheless, he may well be on to what that something is in pointing to the Utopian element of modern genocide...
...Both called for eliminating unproductive or otherwise inferior groups as a method of boosting the health and wellbeing of society at large...
...In applying the UN's explication to his four cases, however, Weitz sometimes wonders whether or not the events he devotes so much attention to fall within its bounds...
...His analysis suggests that the expulsion and murder of "enemy" groups in wartime has ultimately been animated by real grievances based in plausible fact...
...But the quartethe selected has the added problem of being distractingly asymmetrical...
...Reviewed by Gavriel Rosenfeld Assistant professor of history, Fairfield University...
...The first of these is the factor Weitz regards as the most important—if not sufficient—precondition for genocidal violence...
...making room for German Lebensraum...
...Yet that goal hardly explains why the Nazis targeted Jews for murder in such far-flung places as Greece and Scandinavia, where there clearly was no intention of settling Germans...
...By 1914, Weitz observes, the notions of race and nation had been embraced by the supporters of Social Darwinism and eugenics...
...Eric Weitz has given us an important, thought-provoking book on an inordinately complex subject...
...the Nazis' murder of the Jews and Gypsies during the Holocaust...
...That expansiveness also raises the question of why Weitz limited his book to four markedly disparate cases at a time when many other comparative studies of genocide take up a dozen or more...
...The logic doesn't hold, though, where the Nazis' attempt to stamp out the Jews is concerned...
...Too bad, because it is arguably the Utopian impulse toward perfection, no less than the ideas of race and nation, that has helped pave the way for contemporary mass killings...
...What has it achieved...
...Without further elaboration from him, though, what could be a major explanation of modern genocide will remain more of a tantalizing suggestion...
...The author's analytical sophistication is complemented by an ability to capture the harrowing realities of human cruelty and suffering...
...To boot, his choice means ignoring some paradigmatic 20th-century savagery, like the Armenian and Rwandan genocides...
...and the Serbs's laughter of Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s...
...He further records the way perpetrators took pains to involve "ordinary" citizens in the process of murder to spread culpability throughout society at large...
...In other words, the Khmer Rouge murdered Vietnamese merchants and the Serbs killed Bosnian Muslims because of a conflict of interests (whether economic or territorial...
...Over time, however, the focus on difference became transformed into a highly subjective method of affirming hierarchy and promoting exclusion...
...The persecutions were rationally comprehensible, therefore, if no less odious...
...author, "Munich in Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich" IN HIS stimulating new book, Eric Weitz attempts to identify the factors that contributed to horrific acts of mass murder in the 20th century...
...Thus, despite the fact that his chapter on the Soviet Union covers such Stalinist atrocities as causing the death of millions of kulaks in the period of forced collectivization, and killing hundreds of thousands in the Great Terror of 1937-38, Weitz restricts the appellation "genocide" to the forcible relocation of ethnic groups like the Chechens and Tatars—who were not deliberately killed, though many succumbed to the hardships of deportation...
...While that ominously anticipated the genocides to come later in the century, it took a second factor, the emergence of "revolutionary regimes with vast Utopian ambitions," to fully realize the destructive potential of racial and national thinking...
...In his well-argued Introduction, he traces the roots of racial and nationalist thought to an 18th-century scientific attempt to objectively "classify...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
