Dear Colleague,

Perhaps the world's foremost researcher and author on genocide is Dr. Mark Levene (a regular reader of our Library of Social Science Newsletter and Emeritus Fellow in History at the University of Southampton). 

His publications are too numerous to mention here. However, we suggest you visit his Amazon page, where you will get a sense of his monumental output. We hope you will purchase at least one of his books, and--if you are affiliated with a University--recommend as many as possible for purchase by your librarian.

To give you a taste of Professor Levene's ideas, we have provided an excerpt below of his paper, "Why Is the Twentieth Century the Century of Genocide."

Best regards,

Mary Helen (MHGS)

Abstract: The discrepancy between an actual threat--where it exists at all­--and what the perpetrator claims to be a threat is at the heart of what one might call the genocide conundrum. Paradoxically, this is the very reason that the perpetrator's claims cannot simply be dismissed out of hand but require careful examination and evaluation to provide insight into the perpetrator's mindset. The repeated tendency by perpetrators to conjure up or imagine enemies, or to make of real ones something much more terrifying and dangerous than they actually are, represents a clearly cultural and/or psychological dimension to the genocide phenomenon.

"WHY IS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY THE CENTURY OF GENOCIDE?"

(Excerpt's from MARK LEVENE'S paper)

Studies such as Goldhagen on the Holocaust, or Prunier on Rwanda, provocatively remind us that genocide, whether perpetrated by a technologically advanced society like Germany or a relatively undeveloped one like Rwanda, still requires the active mobilization of hundreds of thousands of their "ordinary" citizens to pull triggers or wield machetes; that this involves not a spatial removal but a direct confrontation between perpetrators and victims; and that in consequence genocide in action can be every bit as passionate, vicious, and messy as the massacres of the Peloponnesian or Punic wars.

Type One warfare is between recognized and usually powerful sovereign states within the system. In the twentieth century the "totalization" of these interstate struggles, particularly in the way that, for instance during the Second World War, adversaries have indiscriminately targeted and murdered millions of the noncombatants of the opposing side, has led some writers not only to describe this type of warfare as "genocidal" but to discern similar psychological, technological, and political processes at work as those which inform genocide.

The bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima, or for that matter the creation and active mobilization of nuclear arsenals capable of producing global annihilation, are arguably, no less "crimes against humanity" than Auschwitz or Treblinka. They also suggest the obsolescence of either traditionally grounded or more recently formulated codes of military conduct which are supposed to act as brakes on unlimited warfare between combatants.

Nevertheless, in this type of war there remains, however residually, and even where one side demands the unconditional surrender of the other, a Clausewitzian notion that the struggle is fought between "legitimate" adversaries and that at the end of the day negotiation rather than extermination will determine the position of both victor and vanquished within the postwar world order.

The nature of the Type Two warfare is characterized by the supposedly "legitimate" side dispensing in entirety with Geneva Convention-informed restraints on the grounds that the opposition are little more than "terrorists," "saboteurs," or "bandits" incapable of fighting conventional, "civilized" war. 

Racism invariably confirms this judgmental verdict. In the circumstances, all "necessary" measures for the liquidation of resistance are allowable: mass aerial bombardment, scorched earth, counterinsurgency, mass deportation, environmental devastation, as well as repeated retributive or disciplinary massacre without regard to the age or gender of victims. These features of indiscriminate warfare inevitably bear close resemblance to warfare Type Three which often (though not always) involves genocide.

Type Two is also much closer to Type Three in terms of its justification, the "enemy" in its resistance and obdurate unwillingness to submit being perceived to threaten the integrity of the agenda, or indeed existence, of the "legitimate" state. It is, therefore, "they," the adversary populace, by their misguided actions and belief systems, not to say their atrocities against "us," who are accused of culpability and  responsibility for  the  perpetrator's "war of self-defense" which, as a result, has to be fought a la outrance and without mercy.

Type Two warfare becomes Type Three warfare when the enemy is no longer a perceived "illegitimate" state but a perceived "illegitimate" community within the territorial definition or imperial framework of the perpetrator state.

Thus I argue that "genocide occurs where a state, perceiving the integrity of its agenda to be threatened by an aggregate population-defined by the state in collective or communal terms-seeks to remedy the situation by the systematic, en masse physical elimination of that aggregate, in toto, or until it is no longer perceived to represent a threat."

Yet clearly there is something perplexing, not to say bewildering, in this proposed state-communal equation. Genocide research is predicated on the proposition that whatever genocide is, it cannot be considered warfare in the normally understood sense between two armed combatants-however unequally matched they may be-but an entirely one-sided affair in which a group of absolute perpetrators apply instruments of terror, violence, and unremitting massacre against entirely defenseless, not to say innocent men, women, and children.

Thus, to ascribe threat from the people who are mass murdered appears not simply to define genocide as a two-sided dynamic relationship between a state and an element of its population but to potentially infer that the perpetrator's actions are both legitimate and justifiable.

Indeed, where a state goes down this path it is invariably accompanied by the claim-as witness Serbian behavior with regard to Kosovo-that it is defending itself against an imminent danger to its national security, territorial integrity, or even sovereignty, while at the same time it is going to inordinate lengths not only to conceal the evidence for mass murder but to deny that it has killed anyone.

This discrepancy between an actual threat—where it exists at all­---and what the perpetrator claims to be a threat is at the very heart of what one might call the genocide conundrum. Yet, paradoxically, this is the very reason that the perpetrator's claims cannot simply be dismissed out of hand but requires very careful examination and evaluation not only in the forensic sense of proving whether mass killing did or did not occur but equally importantly in providing a necessary insight into the perpetrator's mindset. The repeated tendency by perpetrators to conjure up or imagine enemies, or to make of real ones something much more terrifying and dangerous than they actually are, represents a clearly cultural and/or psychological dimension to the genocide phenomenon.

Medical science's "discovery" of death-dealing bacteria and bacilli not only coincided with mass epidemics in the new urban and metropolitan centers but also with new and obsessive Social Darwinian discourses about the “survival of the fittest." Fears of communal weakness and febrility thus became associated with anxieties that "foreign bodies" operating from within the body-politic might undermine or contaminate the physical and mental health of the nation, leading in turn to further medically informed but supposedly value-free prognostications on how to protect or improve the national stock by eugenics or other programs of social engineering.

An obvious conclusion one might wish to draw from this picture is that perpetrators  of genocide are stridently ideological  or authoritarian regimes more often than not led by unhinged, psychopathic dictators. Popular portrayals of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, or Pol Pot only reinforce the sense that their actions against "imagined" enemies are essentially symptoms of extreme paranoia, delusion, and projection.

The very fact that in some instances, as for example in the case of the "kulaks," the construction of a coherent and identifiable adversary took place in the heads of the Stalinist leadership and bore no relationship to social realities, only adds to the  view that our subject is one primarily for clinical psychological investigation. Indeed, Nazi ranting and raving about Jewish world conspiracy as just cause for their actions would suggest that worst cases of genocidal behavior are not simply deeply irrational but completely mad.

The problem with this line of reasoning, however, is threefold. First, while the alleged "madness" of the above genocide instigators is not easily verifiable one way or the other, an extended list which might, for instance, include Ataturk, Mao, and Milosevic would be hard-pressed to support the generality of this assumption.

Bauman sees in Nazism and Stalinism "the most consistent, uninhibited expressions of the spirit of modernity." In other words, a highly rational project. Yet when we look at the Nazi onslaught on the Roma, or, again under Nazi aegis, Romania's extermination of its Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jewry, or Stalin's genocidal deportations of Tatar, Chechen, and other minority peoples, or lesser known examples such as the Iraqi "Assyrian affair" of 1933, or almost coincidentally, Mussolini's extirpation of the hill peoples of Cyrenaica, one cannot but be struck by their perpetrators' irrationality.

Their victims did not ultimately suffer genocide simply because they did not "fit" a regime's perception of people homogeneity. They suffered it because the finger was pointed at them as the group or groups accused of actively disrupting or polluting the state's drive to transcend its limitations.

We are back with the massive or hyperinflated imaginings of the state, which another acute observer, Ron Aronson, has described as a "rupture with reality." However, Aronson does not propose that this has no relationship to modernity. On the contrary, what he argues is that in situations where modernity is harnessed as an instrument for the realization of impossible goals what you end up with is a dialectical set of tensions between power and impotence, reason and madness.

In a critical sense the gargantuan nature of a regime's agenda may indicate in advance the degree to which it has already lost touch with reality. But the actual attempt at implementation, "the realization of the unrealizable" as he calls it, is likely to result in a crisis in which, having boxed itself into a comer from which it is unable to retreat, the regime finds that its only recourse is in "reshaping what resists," that is, massive violence. Interestingly, Aronson suggests that it is not only in instances of genocide that this extreme and seemingly irrational behavior can occur.

The United States, for instance, in its attempts to obliterate first much of North Korea in the early 1950s, and then North Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, not to say the rest of Indochina, speaks volumes about the contradictions between an apparently all-powerful hegemon and the actuality of its inability to reorder the world in its own assured image.

What all these scenarios share in common is the state leaderships' conviction of the malevolence of forces "out there" that have conspired not only to frustrate the realization of their agenda but to harm and even possibly physically eradicate their own people. This does not rule out instances where these anxieties have some grain of truth in them.

This notion that the targeted victim group are really the proxies, stooges, or agents of a much more malevolent but dissembled or hidden power intent on denying the state its own, self-directed mission towards unfettered independence and genuine integrity seemingly gravitates us back yet again toward an explanation for genocide in the much murkier waters of psychological mindsets where the perpetrator sees international conspiracies in everything.

The genocidal trajectory of the Khmer Rouge reached both its apogee and nemesis when practically the whole population of its Eastern Zone were provided with blue scarves for their deportation and then extermination on the collective indictment that their Khmer bodies were occupied by "Vietnamese minds."

The episode of the blue scarves ought to throw doubt on arguments which treat genocidal victim groups as fixed entities as in some Linnaean system of plant and animal classification, instead of as the products—often entirely imaginary ones—of the perpetrators' assemblage of social reality. Lemkin's formulation of genocide based on genos (race) in this sense is a disservice to our well-rounded comprehension of the phenomenon.

Certainly, Lemkin's focus on the destruction of the "biological structure" of a communal group was correct and appropriate inasmuch as a distinctiveness of genocide lies in the mass murder of women of all ages equally and without discrimination from the men who are their blood relatives and with the purpose of denying or seeking to deny their biological as well as social reproduction.

 But how this group of people identifies itself, or whether it does so at all, in ethnic, religious, or political terms is immaterial to either a "genocidal process" of human rights abuse and persecution or the actuality of systematic liquidation. When it came to legalizing discrimination against Jews the Nazis' conceptualization of them as a "race" proved to have no empirical or juridical foundation.

By the same token, Himmler's engagement of academics and special institutes to isolate the authentic Roma achieved nothing but contradictory messages. In the end, state perpetrators exterminate groups of people because they perceive them as a threat and find racial, ethnic, or social tags for them as convenient for this purpose. This, however, does not mean that a group need necessarily be a tabula rasa waiting to be victimized. What is important to know is what it is about "the group" that challenges or appears in the perpetrator state's mind to challenge its authority, legitimacy, or integrity.

All this surely brings us back less to the victim groups and more to the nature of the driven regimes which commit genocide, what it is that impels them and, as a necessary corollary to that, what most frightens or haunts them. Our argument has rested on the proposition that the drive to genocide is a function of states with a particularly marked or latent tendency to dispute the discrepancy between the way the world is and the way they think that it ought to be.

The era of Cold War and of bipolar, including potentially nuclear-armed, struggle undoubtedly gave an added edge and intensity to the toxic potential inherent in this condition. "Enemies within" or "enemies of the people" were regularly conjured up by both hard-pressed communist regimes and their most vehement or geographically sensitive opponents in the "free world" camp as justification for the extirpation of ethnic or other elements in the population perceived to stand as obstacles to their monodirectional paths to progress.

 Events in Kosovo surely confirm that contrary to Fukuyama there does remain one great ideological underpinning for genocide as strong now, at the onset of the twenty-first century as it was at the end of the nineteenth: nationalism. Indeed, one might posit that  the emergence of new nation states out of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia in the wake of communist demise both there and more generally, represents the most marked reassertion of toxic tendencies in world historical develop­ ment from the pre-1914 record. Nation states will not readily give up their power or their promise to the forces which drive the global economy, however inexorable those forces may appear to be.