The Biases of Genocide Studies (Part II)

The twentieth century witnessed many genocides and mass slaughters carried out by European states against their own peoples, or by Asian communists who adopted an extreme form of Marxism. Historians and sociologists have advanced a number of general theories in an attempt to explain why these massacres occurred. Possibly the best-known is that of the Jewish Polish-born British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (born in 1925) who, in Modernity and the Holocaust (1991) viewed the Nazi Holocaust, and, by extension, other recent genocides, as a product of “modernity”, a by-product of the orderliness and categorisation of modern secular ideologies, combined with the assembly-line deaths made possible by modern technology and murderous national military rivalries.

In my opinion this viewpoint distorts the nature of modern genocide. Virtually all of the infamous genocides of the twentieth century were caused by one factor alone—the breakdown of the European political and elite structure by the First World War—and would not have occurred in the absence of the catastrophe which began in Sarajevo in June 1914. In destroying the political and elite structure of much of continental Europe, the First World War created a vacuum which was filled by extremist movements, communism and fascism, that would almost certainly never have come to power had the war not ensued for four bloody years, and which then spread to Asia in the form of Asian communism with equally murderous results. Genocide is not inherent in “modernity” or in the culture of the modern West, but is a highly abnormal consequence of the breakdown of long-standing societal frameworks.

The first of the generally recognised twentieth-century genocides was the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915–16. Its history demonstrates clearly that it was the First World War which engendered modern genocides; it was also much murkier and less straightforward than other infamous genocides. Regarded as a European power, the Ottoman empire once stretched from Algeria to Hungary to southern Russia, but after about 1820 suffered a continuous decline and contraction, and, as “the sick man of Europe”, was basically kept alive because Britain, worried about rival German, Russian and French penetration into the Middle East, kept it intact. It was also, to an unusual degree, multicultural, with Armenians, as well as all significant Christian sects and Jews, internally self-governing. Together with Greeks and (to a lesser extent) Jews, Armenians formed the entrepreneurial class in Anatolia, the Turkish heartland.

While Turkish nationalism in the exclusionary sense grew in the early twentieth century, the “Young Turks”—the term has passed into general usage—the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), which took power in 1908, was also multi-ethnic and did not exclude non-Turks. Until war broke out in 1914, a “normal” politics existed, in which Armenians and other minorities fully participated. There were fourteen Armenians in the last Ottoman parliament, elected in 1914, while a number of leading figures in the CUP were Armenians, including Bedros Halacian, public works minister in the CUP cabinet. This was in total contrast to, say, the absolute exclusion of Jews from the Nazi party.

Turkey unwisely entered the war in October 1914 on the side of Germany rather than as an ally of Britain, its traditional protector. At this point, there was no obvious reason to suspect that Turkey’s Armenians were in mortal danger. In late 1914, Russia, now at war with Turkey, responded to a military advance by the Turks into Russia by invading north-eastern Anatolia. The Turkish government viewed the heavily Armenian population of the area as disloyal to it and likely to support the Russians and attempt to form a separate Armenian state. It ordered the deportation of these Armenians to the south of the Ottoman empire. This deportation was carried out in an extremely brutal way, leading to an Armenian uprising at Van in April 1915. The deportations intensified, and were carried out by the Turkish “Secret Organisation”, numbering 30,000 to 40,000, often criminals, as well as Kurdish troops and bandits who hated the Armenians. In an eerie precursor to the Holocaust, many were transported to the south in sealed boxcars or on “death marches”.

Religion also played a role: when Turkey entered the war, the Turkish Sultan, who was also the Caliph, or head of the Islamic religion, declared a jihad against the Allies in the name of Islam, and Armenians, who were Christians, were persecuted for this reason, although their lives would often be spared if they converted to Islam. The number of Armenians who died is unknown. The estimate of 1.6 to 2.1 million often heard is probably too high, with 600,000 out of 800,000 deported a more likely estimate. The radicalised leaders of the CUP who emerged during the war, like Enver Pasha, remain remarkably faceless, in contrast to the Nazis and Soviets.

It seems absolutely clear that the Armenian genocide was a radicalised panic response to the outbreak of the war and the Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia, and would almost certainly not have occurred had war not broken out. The anti-Armenian pogrom did not affect Armenians in Constantinople or in parts of the Ottoman empire besides eastern Anatolia, in the path of the Russians. In the early 1920s, when the great Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (who had played no role in the Armenian genocide) became Turkish President, a large-scale population transfer also occurred, by which thousands of Greeks were “repatriated” from Turkey to Greece, although this was accomplished without violence.

The archetypal example of twentieth-century genocide is, of course, the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis against the Jews and others. It is as certain as any historical counter-factual can ever be that, but for the First World War, the Holocaust would not have occurred. Nazi genocide occurred because Adolf Hitler became the all-powerful dictator of Germany and, at its peak in 1942, the all-powerful master of an empire which stretched from the Spanish border to the gates of Moscow. In June 1914 Hitler was an absolutely unknown denizen of the slums of Vienna, half autodidactic down-and-out and half unsuccessful commercial artist. He had hardly ever set foot in Germany and was an Austrian citizen, not a German at all. Hitler would have had no association with Germany but for the fact that he fought during the First World War in the Bavarian army and, in 1925—after settling in post-1918 Germany—was granted German citizenship.

It is virtually inconceivable that Hitler would have played any role in German politics except for the cataclysmic events which ensued from June 1914, the collapse of the German monarchy, the Prussian aristocracy, the former military elite, and the old middle classes; the deaths of 1.8 million German soldiers in the war; the radicalisation of German politics because of the Bolshevik Revolution; the sudden defeat in November 1918; and the grudging legitimacy of the Weimar Republic. Even in 1919, Hitler had never made a public speech and was not a member of any political party. In June 1914 he stood as much chance of becoming dictator of Germany as of being appointed Chief Rabbi of Berlin.

In the German parliamentary elections of 1928, the last held before the Great Depression, the Nazis polled 2.8 per cent of the vote, electing 12 deputies to the German Reichstag, compared with 128 for the Social Democrats, 73 for the traditional conservative German Nationals, 61 for the Centre Party of the Catholics, 54 for the Communists, and so on. Germany turned to Hitler in desperation when unemployment reached 30 per cent and everything else had been tried and failed. The Weimar Republic might, too, have resisted Hitler if it had produced a charismatic political leader capable of unifying the moderate forces in the country even during the Depression. It is sometimes suggested that Gustav Stresemann, Germany’s able Foreign Minister from 1923 until 1929, might have fulfilled this role had he not died suddenly in 1929 aged only fifty-one.

There is an even more intriguing counter-factual. The highly successful Mayor of Cologne, who was also the President of the Prussian State Council, aged fifty in 1926, was frequently mentioned as a possible Chancellor of Germany but was never chosen by President von Hindenburg. This was Konrad Adenauer, who was removed from both posts by the Nazis and kept a low profile during the Nazi years—although several times he was almost sent to a concentration camp. In 1949 at the age of seventy-three Adenauer emerged from obscurity to become the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. He served in this post until he was eighty-seven, in which time he solidified German democracy, engendered the German “economic miracle,” entered NATO, brought about rapprochement with France and the start of the EEC, recognised Israel and paid out billions, as a matter of principle, to Holocaust survivors and victims’ families. A few years ago Adenauer was chosen in a poll of Germans as the greatest German in history, ahead of Beethoven, Goethe and Bismarck. If Adenauer could do all of this as an old man, it is at least arguable that, in the prime of life, he might have unified Germany’s anti-Nazi forces and prevented a Nazi takeover in 1933. The other fascist regimes which emerged in interwar Europe, such as Mussolini’s in Italy, are also very unlikely to have taken power without the First World War and its effects.

The seventy years or so before 1930 were a period of almost uninterrupted gains for Germany’s Jews, who achieved legal equality in almost all spheres in 1870–71; the Weimar Constitution swept away all remaining forms of discrimination. Few of the well-known anti-Semitic incidents of that period occurred in Germany, as opposed to Russia (the pogroms and systematic Tsarist persecution), Austria-Hungary (Viennese anti-Semitism), France (the Dreyfus Affair), and elsewhere. In Germany, Nazi anti-Semitism found a response because the Jews were apparently too successful, forming a disproportionately large percentage of the country’s business and cultural elite, not because they were persecuted outcasts. German Jewry was itself in the process of increasingly intermarrying with German gentiles, and, it is often said, would have greatly diminished in size over the next half-century through assimilation. Without Hitler, and the context from which the Nazis emerged, especially the Bolshevik Revolution, it is difficult to imagine that German anti-Semitism would have been anything more than a marginal element, if that.

Even more emphatically than with the Nazis in Germany, the communists in Russia plainly and unarguably came to power because of the First World War. After 1905, Russia had a Duma (parliament), for which four elections were held before the 1917 Revolution. The Bolsheviks boycotted the first election, but achieved only derisory support at the subsequent elections. While Russia might well have experienced another successful revolution, as it had in 1905, had the First World War not occurred, it is almost impossible to imagine a Bolshevik seizure of power without the war. The Bolsheviks seized power because the fragile and pre-modern elite and governmental structure of the Tsarist empire had been all but destroyed by the war, in which an estimated 12 million Russians were mobilised and 1.7 million died. Any such revolution would have been more likely to result in either the establishment of a moderate constitutional monarchy, in which Russia’s growing, but now forgotten middle classes would have been dominant, or in an autocratic, perhaps proto-fascist regime still headed by the Tsar.

The Bolsheviks rode to power on the backs of widespread hatred for the war and the destruction of the authority of Russia’s traditional elites. Without the war, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin would have almost certainly remained totally unknown, and, as with Hitler in Germany, it is impossible to see any set of circumstances in which the Georgian revolutionary-cum-criminal Iosef Djugashvili would have become dictator of Russia, as Stalin did from around 1928 on. This prospect is, if anything, even more unlikely than Hitler’s rise in Germany.

The triumph of communism in Russia led directly to the rise of Asian communism after the Second World War—Mao’s China, Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea—and thus to all the mass murders committed by these regimes. Large-scale killings might well have occurred in East Asia, as they did when the Japanese conquered Nanking, but would almost certainly not have been driven by the relentless pursuit of Marxist ideology.

The above list accounts for most of the infamous genocides and massacres of the twentieth century. All of these plainly owe their origin, directly or indirectly, to the First World War. Indeed, without that war there would have been no concept of or even the term “genocide”, which was coined by the Polish-born Jewish refugee in America, Raphael Lemkin, in 1944, in a book about Nazi rule in Europe. Genocide in the sense this is commonly meant is thus a product of the First World War, and inseparable from it.

Genocide is plainly not a direct result of “modernity”, or of the propensity of the modern West to initiate mass murder. Most strikingly, the most “modern” and advanced societies of the West, the English-speaking democracies, did not participate in any of these infamous genocides. On the contrary, America, Britain, Australia and the white Commonwealth continuously fought totalitarianism in the world wars, the Cold War, and the current war with terrorism. Notably, too, those societies where communism and fascism triumphed were either economically underdeveloped (as in Asia), or at lower levels of economic development (as in Russia and Italy), or, in Germany, pursuing what is often termed a “special path” to modernity, marked by very rapid industrialisation side-by-side with a powerful military elite and minimal real democracy.

There are, of course, twentieth-century genocides whose origins cannot be attributed by any reasonable argument to the effects of the First World War, most notably in Rwanda in 1994, where up to 850,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutus in a few months, at a rate, at one stage, of 100,000 per week. Although tribal and ethnic massacres have occurred, and are occurring, at all times since independence in that cesspool of a continent, nothing in post-independence black Africa has rivalled the Rwandan charnel house, and nothing elsewhere since Pol Pot. The occurrence of so comprehensive a slaughter, as opposed to anywhere else in black Africa, remains a mystery, as does the unwillingness of the Clinton administration and other Western governments or the UN to intervene to stop it.

The other type of alleged genocide often suggested by historians is that allegedly perpetrated by colonial settlers and administrators against indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australasia and Africa. I will examine the credibility of these claims in Part III of this series in the next edition.

William D. Rubinstein is professor of history at the University of Wales—Aberystwyth.