The Biases of Genocide Studies

As an academic field, “genocide studies” is quite new, having come into existence only since the 1970s in the wake of the near-universal internalisation of the Nazi Holocaust as a supreme symbol of evil and its extension as an exemplar of genocide to other analogous massacres. From its inception, the field of “genocide studies” has been marked by fierce controversy, which is best illustrated by the essays in Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? (2001). Several of the contributors on both sides here engage in venomous exchanges, with claims made that the Jewish Holocaust was not only not unique, but was not a particularly large-scale example of genocide, in contrast to, in particular, the allegedly far more catastrophic decline in American Indian numbers after 1492. In the very recent past, as essays in Quadrant have made clear, the “genocide studies” field has increasingly focused on Australia, where the fate of the Aborigines since 1788 has become central not merely to domestic political debate but to academic and historical debate on Australian society and its origins.

It is not unfair to say that the topic has been hijacked by the Left as a stick with which to beat mainstream Australian society and its narrative of European settlement and societal development here. As has been noted in this periodical, analogies between the treatment of the Aborigines at the hands of the European settlers and the treatment of Jews and Slavs by the Nazis is a stock-in-trade of the topic’s presentation.

A striking example can be found in a collection of essays edited by A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (2004). That work includes a section on “Stolen and Indigenous Children”, which contains an essay by Isabel Heinemann, a historian at Freiberg University in Germany, entitled “‘Until the Last Drop of Good Blood’: The Kidnapping of ‘Racially Valuable’ Children and Nazi Racial Policy in Occupied Eastern Europe”. It discusses how the Nazis kidnapped, to raise as Germans, “Aryan”-looking Polish, Czech, and other Slavic children during the Second World War. The essay has, needless to say, precisely nothing to do with Australia or Aborigines (and, to add insult to insult, during the period of which Heinemann writes, Australia was at war with Nazi Germany, successfully endeavouring to wipe the Nazi regime off the earth). But its inclusion is plainly intended to show that white Australian society, in stealing Aboriginal children, was as bad as the Nazis, and maybe worse. Like most planted propaganda, it achieves its effect by sleight-of-hand. Nazi Germany is not the most infamous regime in history because it kidnapped “Aryan”-looking Polish children, but because it murdered millions of innocent people, especially Jews. If all the Nazis had done to the Jews in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe was—on the analogy with Australia—to kidnap children with “Aryan” fathers and Jewish mothers and raise them as Germans (while leaving all other Jews alone), would this be regarded as the archetypal example of genocide? Indeed, would anyone today know or care? What the Nazis actually did has been obfuscated in this essay, just as one might expect, in order to make white Australia seem worse than it was.

Ironically, the old Marxist Left would probably never have accepted the contemporary Australian Left’s obsession with Aboriginal “genocide”. Neither Marx nor Lenin was likely to shed a tear over the treatment of the Aborigines by the British settlers. Orthodox Marxists believed in “dialectical materialism”, a progressive, evolutionary view of human history, and would have regarded the Aborigines as Stone Age savages, whose absorption by the higher European society was both inevitable and desirable, bearing in mind that “bourgeois” rule in Australia was itself to be replaced by socialism. The post-Marxist, post-colonialist, post-modernist Left, no longer wedded to Marxist notions of progress, has found in the treatment of the Aborigines a new weapon to attack the same target: mainstream Australia.

The field of contemporary “genocide studies” embodies within it several deep flaws which help to explain the positioning of the European treatment of the Aborigines as a central matrix of evil. Centrally, “genocide studies” omits any and all discussions of genocides and massacres carried out by non-Western peoples against each other, with the exception of slaughters carried out by forces heavily and directly influenced by Western models and ideologies, such as in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. All other mass killings carried out by pre-literate or non-Western peoples against each other are largely if not entirely taboo, as a perusal of virtually any recent book on genocide will show. “Genocide” is what is carried out by Western nations against Western peoples, or by Western nations against indigenous peoples; the rest is silence.

Viewing genocide and massacre in this way, however, consigns many, perhaps the majority, of humanity’s most horrifying genocides and massacres to invisibility—which, of course, is almost certainly the intention of contemporary “genocide studies”. A catalogue of some, but by no means all or most, of the most gruesome and repellent instances of non-Western slaughters and genocides is instructive for what is seldom or never discussed, analysed or condemned in contemporary renditions of “genocide studies”. Again, few recent accounts of genocide discuss any of these events, which have been airbrushed from the historical record.

The rulers of Paraguay in the nineteenth century were among the all-time greats. In that landlocked backwater, the local post-independence elite was drawn largely from descendants of the local Indian population, rather than from Caucasian landowners and military officers, as elsewhere in Latin America. From 1814 until his death in 1840, Paraguay was ruled by Dr José Rodriguez de Francia, a Creole lawyer, who proclaimed himself “supreme dictator” of Paraguay, El Supremo, apparently the first man to be known by this title. Like Pol Pot, Francia attempted to exclude all foreign influences without exception from his country, and had no diplomatic relations with anyone. Increasingly paranoid and murderous, Francia ordered all men in his country to wear a hat, so it could be instantly doffed in his presence. According to one historian, he was so feared by the populace that, after his death, “people still took off their hats and glanced anxiously about them at the mention of his name”.

Francia’s altogether worthy successor, Francisco Salerno Lopez (1827–70), also of part-Indian descent—both men spoke fluent Gurani, the native language—became embroiled in what was, in relative terms, arguably the most destructive war in history. Most unwisely, Lopez picked fights simultaneously with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, resulting in the War of the Triple Alliance of 1864–70, a suicidal struggle in which no quarter was given on either side, and in which, it has been argued, in retaliation his three opponents carried out a deliberate campaign of genocide. Paraguay’s population in 1864 is normally estimated in the range of 450,000 to 900,000. By the war’s end, the population had been reduced to 221,000, of whom only 28,000 were adult males. By one estimate, 450,000 Paraguayans were killed during the war, half of the country’s pre-war population, or more than three times the percentage losses suffered by the Soviet Union in the Second World War. Yet virtually no history of genocide mentions the Paraguayan slaughterhouse, possibly because it was not launched by Europeans.

At about the same time on the other side of the world, there occurred in China the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64. It was led by Hong Xinquan (1813–64), a member of the Hakka minority, who had repeatedly failed the difficult examination for the Mandarin Civil Service and had become a convert to a variant of Christianity. Hong became convinced that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and also declared himself the head of a new ruling dynasty, the Taiping Tianguo, which gathered a huge following and captured many cities. It was suppressed by the Chinese government with a brutality that beggars belief.

In his book Historical Demography (1969), T.H. Hollingsworth stated, “Although we have had an Auschwitz in modern times, it would seem as though the Germans were only beginning to reach the degree of massacre that the Taipings regarded as normal.” According to one recent historian, “Ningpo became a ‘city of the dead,’ with no trace of its half million inhabitants.” One Chinese county declined in population from 311,000 in 1855 to 5078 in 1865, a loss of 98 per cent of its inhabitants. In the eleven most heavily affected localities, there was a loss of population of 68 per cent, from 8.9 million to 2.9 million. It appears certain that 10 million people were killed in the Taiping Rebellion, three times the death toll in the Armenian genocide and Pol Pot’s Cambodia combined, although some historians place the death toll at 20 to 30 million. Yet the Taiping Rebellion remains, if not entirely unknown, at least unknown to most recent historians of genocide, who apparently are unable to come to terms with a pre-twentieth-century non-European people slaughtering itself.

Nor, it seems, can they do so when the European colonial rulers halt genocide and mass murder rather than allegedly carry it out. This occurred, among other places, in India in the years to 1840, when the British suppressed thuggee. The Thugs—our word derives from these merry bands—were devotees of the goddess Bhowani or Kali, the Hindu deity of death and destruction. For hundreds of years groups of Thugs, usually numbering between twenty and fifty men, roamed the roads of India seeking victims for Kali. Their usual mode of operation was to pretend to be courteous merchants or soldiers, gain the confidence of groups of travellers, and then kill them all with a ruhmal, the strangling handkerchief. Only indigenous Indians were killed by the Thugs: no European was ever killed by them.

About 40,000 persons were murdered annually by the Thugs, with estimates of their total number of victims in the century before they were suppressed ranging from one to three million. The “King of the Thugs” was one Burham, who personally killed 931 victims over a forty-year period, until he was hanged by the British in 1830. Two other celebrated adherents of thuggee killed, at around the same time, 604 and 508 victims. The murderous cult was suppressed by the British, especially Lord William Bentinck and Sir William Sleeman, between 1826 and 1840, when 1400 Thugs were hanged by those brutal colonial occupiers.

Although the horrors of Aztec society are better known than is the case with most indigenous cultures, characteristically the history of Mexico is portrayed as the destructive Spanish conquest of a remote people (which in part it was). In its religious aspects, Aztec society centred on human sacrifice. Between 10,000 and 20,000 persons were sacrificed annually throughout Aztec Mexico, or about 1.5 million people in a century. At the dedication of the Great Temple of Tenochitalan in 1487, a minimum of 14,000 victims were sacrificed, although one recent estimate by a surgeon placed the total at 78,000 in four days, with four lines of prisoners stretching for two miles. The Aztec royal court included a zoo, where animals were fed on the remains of the sacrificial victims, a special rack displayed 60,000 skulls of victims, and, in Stuart J. Friedel’s words, “apartments for human freaks”.

Constant wars with neighbouring peoples increased Aztec mortality by 20 per cent and were an important factor in limiting Aztec population growth, although one anthropologist, Marvin Harris, has suggested that Aztec sacrifices were an excuse for cannibalism, in order to augment the meagre supply of animal proteins. Driven by lust for gold and the Catholic religion, the despicable Spanish invaders destroyed this charming civilisation.

Shaka Zulu (reigned 1817–28) is probably the only pre-colonial black African leader who is generally known today. A hero to the Zulu people, he centralised and militarised the Zulu nation. Yet he was also a demented mass murderer who stands comparison with Genghis Khan or the Nazis. In 1826 Shaka’s army of 50,000 literally destroyed the Ndwandwe, a rival tribe. According to one report, all 40,000 Ndwandwe were put to death. When asked why he killed the women and children, Shaka replied that “they can propagate and bring children, and may become my enemies”, the same response given by Heinrich Himmler to a similar question about the Jews.

Witchcraft, rather than dementia, led to the death by mass starvation of another southern African people owing to King Sarhili of the Gcaleka Xhosa in 1855–58. He was convinced by a female witch doctor that the only way to end a drought was to kill all of the tribe’s cattle. As a result, most Xhosa starved to death, their estimated population declining from 105,000 to 26,000 in three years. Vastly more Xhosa died in this period than all of the black South Africans who were killed under apartheid, and probably as many as the number of Hereros and Nama killed in German South-West Africa in 1904–07, an event often cited as an example of Western genocide against black Africans. Yet the perishing of the Xhosa through starvation remains almost unknown in the West, doubtless because Africans rather than Europeans were responsible for it.

Black slavery is often seen as so brutal as to be genocidal. In the centuries in which slavery existed, probably about 900,000 people died on the “Middle Passage” to America, with several millions more dying prematurely in the New World. Yet a number of seldom heard points should be noted.

First, it appears that most Africans who died during the enslavement process were killed by other blacks. Whenever a European slaving ship appeared off the coast, it was actually local black tribes and their kings who captured and enslaved blacks from the interior and sold them into slavery. Black African tribal leaders like the King of Wydah (on the Gold Coast) killed without scruple in order to sell their captives to the whites, who, in comparison, were relatively humane. According to the historian Oliver Ransford, on one such raid 4500 persons were killed “on the spot” by a local king and his soldiers.

Second, one aspect of slavery that remains virtually unknown is the forced servitude that existed in Muslim countries. About one quarter of captured African slaves were transported to the Islamic world. Unlike Europeans, however, Muslims did not discriminate on the basis of race, but also captured and kept vast numbers of European Christians as slaves. According to Robert C. Davis (“Counting European Slaves on the Barbary Coast,” Past and Present, August 2001) “nearly as many Europeans were forcibly taken to Barbary and worked as slaves as were West Africans hauled off to labour on plantations in the Americas”, suffering a death rate as high as 25 per cent per year in the process. In 1804–5 the United States fought a little-known war against Tripoli, the first foreign war ever fought by America, over the enslavement and ransoming of American citizens. Unlike slavery in the New World, no local abolitionist movements ever arose in the Muslim world, where slavery often remained legal until the recent past. Nor have any monuments or museums been erected to their memory. Only Europeans are condemned for slavery, and not the black chieftains who actually carried out most enslavement nor the Muslims who practised slavery on a grand scale.

The situation in Australia is similar to that elsewhere: what the British settlers did to the Aborigines is well known and widely condemned as “genocide”; what the Aborigines did to each other is simply excluded from the picture. Pre-contact Aborigines (and those living in remote places until recently) were fairly typical nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose societal structure was largely defined by the fact that they did not experience the Neolithic Revolution, and therefore did not domesticate livestock or grow plants for food. Their hundreds of tribes were much smaller in size than, say, those of the North American Indians and had no wide-ranging mechanisms of governance. For these reasons, population growth beyond the economic limits of their nomadic lifestyles could not be tolerated, since it threatened the fragile economic bases of their existence. Pre-contact Australian Aborigines were thus almost forced to engage in population limitation through what we would term murder on a great and continuing scale, especially infanticide.

It is generally estimated that about 30 per cent of Aboriginal infants were killed at birth as excess mouths to feed. Deformed children “were always killed at birth”, as well as “one or both of twins”, along with illegitimate children, according to the anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw (“Infanticide in Aboriginal Australia,” Oceania, 48, No. 4, 1978). Assuming a consistent 30 per cent rate of infanticide over the 40,000-year history of pre-contact Aboriginal society, the number of Aboriginal babies deliberately murdered must have run into the tens, even hundreds, of millions.

Pardon me, but if the killing of 20,000 Aborigines by white settlers over a 150-year period—the widely accepted figure—constitutes “genocide”, and if the kidnapping of children with white fathers and Aboriginal mothers, in order for them to be raised as whites, constitutes “genocide”, then how should the deliberate murders of literally tens of millions of Aboriginal babies by their tribes be described? Instead of condemnation, the “black armband” brigade either ignores these realities altogether or actually apologises for them. For instance, Richard Broome, in his Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800 (2005), on page 64, acknowledges that Aboriginal infanticide occurred, but states that “None of the European claimants [of Aboriginal infanticide] acknowledged that infanticide … was also practised—but not condoned—in European society.” This is surely rather like urging that it was perfectly true that the Nazis murdered people, but murders also occurred—although were not condoned—in Australia, Britain and America. Infanticide was embedded in pre-contact Aboriginal society as an economic necessity, while in Europe it was illegal and likely, at the time, to be punished with the death penalty.

Moreover, widespread Aboriginal infanticide continued in remote areas until only a few decades ago (at the earliest). The anthropologist Aram A. Yengoyan, who carried out field work among the Pitjantjatjara people in 1966–67, found that infanticide there “may have varied from 18 per cent to 20 per cent of all births”, although “it would have been higher if infant mortality rates were not as high as they were both in the bush and contact populations” (“Biological and Demographic Components in Aboriginal Australian Socio-Economic Organization”, Oceania, 43, 1972, p. 88). Yengoyan also states that “Presently infanticide is no longer openly practised on missions and government stations”—in other words, while missions and government stations have been widely accused of being very significant in facilitating the “Stolen Generation” mode of “genocide”, they actually saved probably hundreds of Aboriginal babies from being murdered.

The facts of Aboriginal infanticide raise a number of interesting questions, especially for the contemporary Left. Were the white settlers, colonial administrators and missionaries justified in suppressing Aboriginal infanticide? It may seem that the answer to this is self-evident, but since infanticide was an authentic component of pre-contact Aboriginal society, was not its suppression an egregious example of imperialism and colonial dominance? Since infanticide continued in the outback until the late 1960s (at least), its perpetrators must in some cases still be alive. If infanticide is murder, should they be brought to belated justice?

Apart from the modern West—or, more precisely, the English-speaking democracies of the West, most of human history and most non-Western societies have been hallmarked by nightmarish, murderous barbarism on a scale so pervasive and so hellish that its extent can hardly now be grasped. But this is assuredly not the way in which pre-literate and most non-Western societies are perceived. In the case of pre-literate societies, several factors are responsible. The “Myth of the Noble Savage” has been deeply ingrained in Western culture for several hundred years: our common image of pre-literate societies is not that of Aboriginal infanticide, but of Captain Cook’s Tahiti, an Eden-like tropical paradise.

This perception is compounded by what the Australian anthropologist (and former editor of Quadrant) Roger Sandall acutely noted, that 99 per cent of all anthropological expeditions and surveys were carried out after these societies were already colonised by Europeans and (in his word) “defanged”, their most horrifying and deadly customs suppressed by Western administrators and missionaries. As this essay has tried to show, these long-standing tendencies have been reinforced in recent decades by the Left’s domination and repositioning of “genocide studies” to attack the West. There is, in addition, another aspect of this subject that deserves discussion, the nature of twentieth-century genocides in the Western world and elsewhere, which will be examined in another article.

William D. Rubinstein is professor of history at the University of Wales—Aberystwyth. Until 1995 he was professor of social and economic history at Deakin University. He is the author of Genocide: A History (Longmans, 2004) and many other works.