MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Ben Valentino, a Political Scientist at Dartmouth University discusses his book, “Final Solutions: Mass Killings and Genocide in the 20th Century” with Jerry Fowler. He explains the concept behind the word “mass killing” which he uses in his book to encompass the intentional killing of 50,000 or more civilians over the course of five or fewer years. Instead of concentrating solely on the common causes of genocide, namely social factors, Mr. Valentino examines mass killings--a wider and more comprehensive field--focusing on the political elites in power, their goals and how they came to power.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Ben Valentino. He is a Political Scientist at Dartmouth University and author of “Final Solutions: Mass Killings and Genocide in the 20th Century.” Ben, welcome to the program.
BEN VALENTINO: Thank you Jerry; it is a pleasure to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: Ben, your book “Final Solutions” explores the causes of mass killing of civilians, but I wanted to start with a semantic issue. You take some pains to draw the distinction between the word genocide and your concept of mass killing?
BEN VALENTINO: That is correct. I think as I started out this book, I struggled to decide how I would define the subject that I would be studying. This book began as a Ph.D. dissertation when I was in graduate school. I assumed I would write a book about genocide but it did not take me long, sort of delving through the literature on genocide academic and legal debates, to realize that that term had become intensely fraught with political, legal and academic debate, and fundamentally in the end, I realized that there were many events out there that I was interested in studying, events in which tens of thousands, even millions of civilians had been slaughtered that probably did not meet the formal United Nations Genocide Convention definition of genocide. These are events like the killing of political groups in Communist states like the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia. Political groups, as you know, are not provided with explicit protection under the Genocide Convention and so, I decided for a much broader and more general definition that includes all of the cases we normally think of as genocide, like the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide or Rwanda, but also includes other kinds of violence against political groups and other groups, including violence that does not aim to exterminate every last member of the group, but nonetheless, kills a large number of innocent civilians; so I focus on something that I just call “mass killing,” this more general term that I define as the intentional killing of 50,000 or more civilians over the course of five or fewer years. I am really just focusing on very intense and intentional killing of civilians—whatever groups they come from and for whatever reasons the perpetrators might have for killing them as long as the killing is intentional.
JERRY FOWLER: Using that definition of mass killing—50,000 or more civilians killed in five or fewer years—how often does this happen? How many cases did you look at?
BEN VALENTINO: There are two ways to look at it. In one sense it is quite common; there are well over fifty episodes—somewhere between fifty and sixty episodes—depending on how you divide some of them up in the course of the 20th century, so if they were spread out evenly; one every other year or even more frequently than that. In that sense it seems quite common, more common than we would normally think, but on the other hand, one has to remember that there are hundreds of countries in the world, and in the last century they were around for a hundred years, so there are thousands of country years in which a genocide could have occurred. As I say, we have just between fifty and sixty, so in other words, most societies, the vast majority of societies, a vast majority of the time are not engaged in violence of this scale, so it is both more common than we wish it was, than we think it is, but also, by any reasonable definition, it is a rare event for any given country.
JERRY FOWLER: Your point in looking at these cases was to try and figure out, are there commonalities in terms of the causation, and many scholars who have looked at this problem have identified social characteristics that contribute to genocide, but you ended up going in a different direction.
BEN VALENTINO: That is right. In fact, another reason why I decided to opt for this definition of mass killing instead of focusing on the more traditional concept of genocide is that I felt that people argued, “We should look at genocide because genocides have common causes that differentiate them from other kinds of violence against civilians,” and I thought, “That sounds plausible, possible, but how could we know that until we look at both and compare their causes?” I really wanted to see if there were some general causes of genocide and mass killing across a wide variety of cases, and as you say, most people who studied this before I began looking at it in the early 90’s were focusing on social factors, things that defined whole societies. You might think of them as saying that there are some societies out there that are sick, generally they are rampant with racism or institutionalized discrimination between groups, and they said these are the factors that provide the real preconditions for genocide. What I found is not that such factors do not play an important role in most cases of genocide or mass killing, but simply that they do not provide very good predictors of where the violence is likely to occur and where it is not, and the reason for that is that most societies unfortunately, are afflicted with some of these social problems, even quite severe social problems that we see when we look only at countries that suffer from genocide. I always remind people that the American South—even as late as the 1950’s and early 1960’s—is one of the most racist, institutionally discriminating societies on the planet. It looks about as bad as apartheid in South Africa, but neither of those cases—neither the American South or South Africa—really witnessed genocide; not to say these countries did not witness violence against minority groups—of course they did—but it never reached the level of genocide or mass killing. We could point to many other examples of these kinds of societies—societies in which there are a large amount of hatred or discrimination—but genocide never materializes. On the flip side, we could point to many societies that seem to be actually relatively peaceful and homogenous, where we subsequently do see genocide and mass killing. Here, some of the more recent cases are instructive—Bosnia, for example—researchers have found that there was a higher degree of intermarriage between Serbs and Croatians and some other minority groups in that country than between Blacks and Whites in the United States. Intermarriage has got to be one of the best indicators of how accepting different groups are of each other. The same is true in Rwanda with very high rates of intermarriage there, the Hutu and Tutsi—the Hutus were the perpetrators of the genocide, the Tutsis were the victims—spoke the same language, practiced the same religion, shared much more in common than maybe even your average groups, if you picked two groups at random from another society. It would be difficult to predict where genocide and mass killing is likely to occur just by looking at these social factors, so I felt we had to look to something else if we were to understand where this type of violence is likely to occur and where it is not, and I found that the only place to find these differences was in who the political elite were in these societies and what their interests were, and I found that elites with certain types of goals and interests and beliefs were the ones that were most likely to commit mass killing, whether or not their society was already afflicted with racism or discrimination on a sort of institutionalized scale.
JERRY FOWLER: What are the characteristics of those elites?
BEN VALENTINO: I think these elites tend to be small groups, generally unrepresentative of society; very few of them have come to power through democratic means, and they in general are looking out across their societies and trying to solve what they see as problems, threats to their interests, threats to their goals, threats to them militarily, so I divided in the book the mass killings and genocides of the 20th century into three main categories.
The first focuses on communist groups, and my argument there was that leaders in these communist societies—again, highly unrepresentative generally, small groups of elites—were attempting to transform society from a capitalist, private economy into a communist, collective economy, and in doing so needed to force people from their homes to change their very ways of life, and as they struggled to do that they found over time more and more that they needed to resort to violence to force people into these different ways of life. That often resulted in massive episodes of violence; in fact, the largest episodes of violence and mass killings in human history occur in the Soviet Union and China around the collectivization of agriculture—the effort to force people off their individual farms and force them to work essentially for the state on large collective farms—and as people resisted that movement, and as the farms failed to produce, people were both killed and died in massive famines. That was the first category.
The second category is a much more traditional, well-known class of events, and these are the ethnic mass killings, and these occur again not simply because elites or the population has some discrimination against an ethnic group in their society or negative feelings or dehumanizing attitudes, but instead because they come to see that ethnic group as a threat to their interests, and a threat that they decide can only be met by forcibly removing that group from society. In many cases, violence that we think of as genocide is really part of an effort of lower class crime against humanity that is called “ethnic cleansing”—the effort to force people from their homes, and many genocides essentially result from the efforts to ethnically cleanse groups. These concepts should be kept separate. Ethnic cleansing is about moving people from their homes, and genocide is about killing them, but interestingly, in many cases, the one leads to the other; ethnic cleansing leads to genocide as it leads to try to force people from their homes against their will. These people—as happened in the case of Armenia—end up in places that cannot support them, where disease and hunger are rampant and people die in large numbers, both there, and violence is required to evict them from their homes. That is the second category.
The last category of mass killings that I looked at has to do with this specific kind of warfare which is guerilla warfare, and here we find that elites facing some sort of guerilla resistance in their country are trying to put down that resistance, trying to put down an insurgency, but the problem with doing so with traditional military means is that the guerillas tend to hide; they do not want to confront the military forces of the state directly since those military forces are stronger, so they attempt to hide and blend in with the civilian population. Moreover, they depend upon that civilian population for all the things that they need to do to continue to operate—for information about the government, food, resources, ammunition, shelter, all of these things—and as a result, the government in an effort to put down these insurgencies decides that the best way to attack the insurgencies is to attack the targets that are not hiding from them: the civilians. I think that in some sense, this is what is going on right now in Darfur, where at least 200,000, and some say as many as 400,000 people have been killed in what I think is a classic counter-insurgency campaign against some rebel groups, but it is also what happened in places like Guatemala during their Civil War in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, and in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan which may have killed as many as two million people, and again also in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, so it is a very common form of mass killing.
JERRY FOWLER: What you are describing is leaders, relatively small groups of leaders, who decide that extreme high levels of violence can be used strategically to achieve their goals. Is there some further defining characteristic for the leaders who will use that kind of violence? Is there a genocidal mentality? Or would basically, many political leaders be willing to resort to violence if their goals were important enough and they were being stymied enough?
BEN VALENTINO: I think there are sort of two answers to this question. On the one hand, we should be careful not to think of the people who carry about this violence as entirely different than us. We should remember that when even democracies, even our own country, the United States, has its back to the wall, we have been willing in the past to do horrendous things to try to protect our interests, so we can think of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the other fire bombings on Japan in World War II as similar to these counter guerillas mass killings that I described. In other words, they were an effort by the United States to win those wars against a country that was resisting furiously, and we decided at a certain point during the war that the best way, the most effective way for us to win, was to target Japanese morale by bombing their civilians and killing them in really enormous numbers. These were not blood thirsty, uncivilized leaders; these were President Roosevelt and Truman who made these decisions, and they did so, I think, trying to ensure the best interests of our country. That being said, I do see some commonality between many of the cases of genocide and mass killing, especially the more traditional ones that we think of, and that is that many of these leaders have come to power not through democratic means like FDR and Truman did, but after some prolonged struggle in which they fought violently to achieve power in their country—this is certainly true of the Soviet regime and the Khmer Rouge as well and the military regime in Guatemala, for example, the Afghan regime in Afghanistan, even Hitler of course, a small group that had been fighting, the Nazis, a small group that had been fighting for many years to come to power—and as a result, these groups are in some ways inured to violence, and they believe that violence is an effective way to achieve their ends. What is more, there has been some sort of selection process involved because in any society, there are different groups that may be competing for power, and it often turns out to be the case—I think this was true especially in some of these communist countries—that those most willing to use violence, to apply most broadly, most brutally, are the ones that have actually succeeded in this competition for power, so I do see a commonality in that many of these regimes are both suspicious of threats to their power—after all, they were once a small group that toppled the government of a major state—and ready and willing to use violence, and so in that sense I do think there is that sense of commonality across many of these elites.
JERRY FOWLER: You referred to the use of strategic bombing in World War II, and a lot of people would not only be resistant, but object to the idea that the United States’ conduct in World War II is in the same category as Stalin’s murder of millions or the Holocaust.
BEN VALENTINO: Of course they would, and I would certainly object to painting them with the same moral brush, but nevertheless, this is one consequence of using a term as general as I have used, mass killing as opposed to a more narrow term like genocide, that it encompasses episodes of violence about which I think most people would wish to apply different levels of moral sanction, but I think this is a common problem with the English language or a problem with any language. We have terms like “war” and “revolution” that apply both to good wars and to bad wars, so not many people would claim that the American Revolution and the Russian Revolution deserve the same sort of moral judgment or that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which is a war and World War II deserve the same moral judgment, so we call them by the same term and I think that in all cases—this is true both of war and of mass killing—we ought to question the morality of anyone who makes a conscious decision to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians, but in the end I think it is appropriate to apply different levels of morality and moral judgment to these different actions, but that is not to say that in some sense they do not have similar causes. In both cases—Stalin’s murder of thousands of peasants and suspected anti-communists in his country and the bombing of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians—these were motivated by elites attempting to achieve their goals. In most cases, I think this is true both of Stalin and the leaders of the United States who ordered those bombings; this was a policy of last resort after they felt that other means that they might use to achieve their ends had failed. There was a gradual escalation in both cases to higher and higher levels of violence, but again, I would not wish to portray them both as sharing the same moral universe.
JERRY FOWLER: If it is the case as you say that this mass killing is the product of strategic calculation rather than broad social characteristics, what are the implications of this perspective for preventing or responding to mass killing?
BEN VALENTINO: I think that is one of the most important parts of my research because I think it has very important implications for genocide prevention. Much of the thinking about genocide prevention, I think over the last twenty years or so, has focused on how we can go about fixing these endemic problems in societies that are believed to be responsible for causing genocide and mass killing. When people think about how we can prevent genocide and mass killing in the future, they think about healing these sick societies, getting ethnic groups in these societies to love each other again, to respect each other, bringing democracy to these countries, raising the standard of living so that people do not need to fight over the basic necessities of life, a whole variety of efforts that are directed at what are perceived to be the root causes of genocide. These are noble and worthwhile causes. I think, even if they did not prevent genocide, it would be a good idea to try to bring these things to foreign societies, but I think it should also be fairly clear that doing this, and across all the countries that lack these things, that lack democracy, that lack good relations between all of their different ethnic minorities, that this would be an enormously expensive proposition, and one that is not likely to happen anytime soon. Instead, I think, when we start to locate the causes of mass killings with political elites as opposed to society at large, we can focus our strategies of genocide prevention on removing or influencing the calculus of those elites as opposed to attempting to re-craft entire societies. To me, that is a more hopeful way of looking at genocide prevention. It means that more limited forms of intervention might be successful, if they aim at these elites as opposed as to aiming at the whole society.
JERRY FOWLER: It is not necessarily easy but at least it makes it a bit more of a manageable problem.
BEN VALENTINO: I certainly think it is not easy. I am always reminded that we entered Iraq with the explicit goal of regime change, changing the elite—a single elite perhaps—in charge of that society, and it has been far from easy to accomplish that there, so we should not underestimate the challenges of changing foreign regimes. Certainly I think those challenges are of a lower magnitude than they are to alter an entire society, to get people to love each other. We have had enough trouble in our own society, and we are still working very hard to try to get the different ethnic, cultural, and religious groups in our own society to accept and tolerate each other. The idea that we can do that effectively in dozens of foreign countries, I think is, at this stage a bit of a pipe dream.
JERRY FOWLER: We are running short of time, but let me ask you this briefly, once elites decide to use mass violence, can they be dissuaded from it? Can their calculation be changed with something short of regime change?
BEN VALENTINO: I think it can but we need to be careful about what those incentives are. One thing we need to remember as we contemplate what levers we will try to apply to these foreign regimes, short of changing them altogether, is that typically their decision to use genocide or mass killing is made after they determine that these victim groups pose a moral threat to them in some sense, to their most important goals, to their continued survival, to their continued place in power, and as a result, if we offer sanctions or incentives that are much less than that, well then these leaders are likely to take their chances, thinking that if they do not deal with the threat posed by these victims they will be out of power, they might even be dead, and so if the international community cannot offer threats that are commensurate with those that the perpetrators believe are posed by their victims, than we are unlikely to be successful in dissuading them, so I do not think that harsh language or mild economic sanctions are generally likely to work. These elites who are contemplating mass killing are already seeing graver threats than that from their victims.
JERRY FOWLER: Ben Valentino is a Political Scientist at Dartmouth University and author of “Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century.” Ben, thanks for being with us.
BEN VALENTINO: Thanks very much.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
