Why not ditch genocide studies?
Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder, by Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley

Philip Cunliffe
posted 15 February 2008

Daniel Chirot’s and Clark McCauley’s book is a recent addition to the burgeoning field of ‘genocide studies’ – an appropriately dismal new science for a pessimistic early twenty-first century. By understanding the sources of genocide, Chirot and McCauley want to suggest ways of mitigating carnage in future. But instead of bringing a humane understanding to bear on the problem of mass murder, Chirot and McCauley construct a crude account of exterminatory violence, with darkly misanthropic political conclusions.

Chirot and McCauley cast themselves in the role of intrepid social scientists, calling established conventions into question by comparing episodes of mass murder beyond the Holocaust. They want to understand the ‘logic and rationale’ behind indiscriminate slaughter (p4). They define ‘genocidal mass murder’ as ‘politically motivated violence that directly or indirectly kills a substantial proportion of a targeted population, combatants and non-combatants alike, regardless of their age or gender.’ (p17) Wielding the urbane methods of modern sociology, they do not truck in stereotypes, and reject loose talk about ‘ancient’ hatreds as a way of explaining mass murder. Chirot and McCauley are scrupulously fair in designating historical incidents of genocide. For them, genocide is not limited to tribal warfare or totalitarian states: they dutifully rehearse the question of whether the Irish Famine of the mid-nineteenth century and America’s atomic bombing of Japan constitute genocide. In their discussion, virtually every colour and every creed falls into the multicultural annals of both perpetrators and victims of genocide.

But the upshot of this political correctness in spreading the blame for genocide across many peoples and states, is an indifference to concrete questions of historical context. Striving for objectivity, Chirot and McCauley want to transcend the messy ‘ideological and historical disputes about what was intentional or in some sense accidental, and what can be justified by some sort of complex rationalization or must be viewed as criminal’ (p17). As a result, they feel no compunction about discussing the mass murder of Indonesian leftists following General Suharto’s coup d’état in 1965, France’s sixteenth century wars of religion, and the tribal slaughter glorified in the Old Testament – all in the same breath (p38). This jumbling together of very different moments reflects the problems of their social psychological method, which locates the causes of genocide in a set of motives and dispositions (such as revenge, fear, convenience, amongst others).

There are three key problems with identifying the causes of genocide in this way. First, it stretches the concept of genocide. As they claim that genocide arises out of a series of particular socio-psychological traits, this allows Chirot and McCauley to see such traits in other instances of violence. Hence they claim that embryonic genocide can be detected in small-scale brutality, such as ethnic pogroms. In effect, this puts genocide on a sliding scale of violence. Second, the ‘causal nexus’ that they identify as lying behind genocide is a disembodied set of mental and emotional dispositions, latent in humanity and always threatening to set off mass murder. As a result they repeatedly tear episodes of exterminatory violence out of their social and historic context. This leads to the third problem. Once genocide is seen as something that is always lurking in the human psyche, it means there is no need to root explanations of mass violence in specific structures of social and political oppression, or in the causes of conflict.

All of this seriously distorts our understanding of both the origins and dynamics of indiscriminate violence. For example, Chirot and McCauley are particularly struck by the mutilation of victims during the 1965-66 massacres of Indonesian Communists and the Catholic pogroms against Protestants in sixteenth century France (p37). In Chirot and McCauley’s eyes the gratuitous character of mutilation speaks to the profound need for psychological purity found in human beings. In their eyes, the perverted, excessive character of mutilation speaks to the depth of this need for purity – according to Chirot and McCauley, one of the most dangerous motives behind genocide.

But if mutilation and mass murder tells you something about the intensity of specific conflicts, how much does it actually advance our understanding of these historical moments? To understand why bloodshed may be so particularly excessive at certain points, it is necessary to understand the concrete details of the historical context: the social background to the conflict, the political stakes in the struggle, the social makeup of the perpetrators and victims, and so on. By using the same set of tools to understand vastly different periods, Chirot and McCauley unsurprisingly keep on re-discovering the same types of genocide throughout history: in the Old Testament, in Genghis Khan’s conquests, in Europe’s wars of religion, in American expansion westwards, and so on.

Of course, it is always easy to call for greater nuance in someone else’s analysis. But Chirot and McCauley’s analysis is not merely one-sided – it systematically restricts attempts to understand exterminatory violence. Take Chirot and McCauley’s examination of Nazism. For them, Hitler’s actions are another example of the longing for purity. But why were fears of racial decline in particular so widespread, that the Nazis were able to capitalise politically on them? The defensive character of racism – rallying against the threat of imminent racial decay – can only be understood if it is seen in the context of resisting change: for trying to root a social order in biology is always an attempt to freeze it. To understand why racist ideas were so influential in the 1920-30s requires an understanding of the struggle over social and political change in inter-war Europe. The power and appeal of racist ideas reflected the power of the challenge to the established political order, which racism aimed to deflect.

Without this grasp of historical context, Chirot and McCauley are forced, even against their own better judgement, to keep on invoking the depravity of individual dictators. They then turn this into a social explanation by simply generalising this depravity to the population at large. But Nazism was not just a spasm of mass depravity: it had a definite political content that did not evenly appeal to all, but attracted the support of specific classes and reactionary groups. If this is not understood, then it is impossible to understand Nazi barbarism.

This takes us to the third problem. Chirot and McCauley acknowledge that there has to be inequality in power between two groups before genocide can take place. But as they take violent extermination to be a latent feature of the human psyche, Chirot and McCauley can avoid talking about how violence grows out of specific instances and structures of oppression. Indeed, it is remarkable that Chirot and McCauley have managed to write a whole book that can detachedly pore over the annals of mass murder and yet so studiously avoid talking in any detail about oppression, exploitation and inequality.

With no conceptual apparatus in which they can talk about violence in historically specific terms, they end up putting themselves in the absurd position of having to explain why genocide is not more common. From here on, Chirot and McCauley’s argument can only be platitudinous. Having shown that people can be very bad, they also show that people can be good – at least if the right structures are in place. They identify a range of countervailing mechanisms that restrain genocidal impulses: conflict resolution rituals and practices, friendship between different groups, ideas of individualism rather than communitarianism, and so on.

Tellingly, one solution to conflict that Chirot and McCauley cannot rely on is the progressive expansion of human freedom. Indeed, their answer to forestalling genocide involves increasing constraint rather than removing it: multiculturalism has to be fostered, social harmony has to be policed by the state, which in turn needs to be checked by international law and diplomacy, and the ‘international community’ (read: the great powers).

Perversely, in their attempt to mitigate genocide, Chirot and McCauley end up normalising both genocide and oppression. Instead of genocide being seen as an exceptional feature of dark historical periods, it becomes one facet of the human condition. Once genocide is rooted not in social structures of oppression but in human behaviour as such, the solution to mass violence cannot lie in advancing freedom, as this could potentially unleash genocidal impulses. As long as the social order upholds a certain set of institutions to keep different communities from each other’s throats, it can remain divided, unequal and oppressive.

Justifying their overall approach, in their introduction Chirot and McCauley say:

Some may think it is a mistake to look at less clear or less deadly cases of mass killing. It can be argued that the moral force of denouncing and acting against genocide is undermined by any suggestion that more limited forms of violence, such as deadly ethnic riots or localized massacres, are part of the same phenomenon (p4)

In fact, the problem is the exact opposite of this. In any discussion about political violence today, it seems impossible to reach any sort of decisive moral judgement without invoking genocide. Hence the inflation, and debasement, of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘holocaust’, as they are promiscuously applied to an ever wider range of conflicts. It speaks to the bankruptcy of our postmodern liberal ethics that they provide us with no moral resources with which to condemn the barbarism and atrocity that is less than genocide, but no less barbaric for it. Worse, this same ethical system advances the idea that government and political practice can be justified not in terms of human advancement, but rather protection from the worst imaginable violence and mayhem. In their depiction of an unchanging human nature, Chirot and McCauley rationalise this outlook, giving us moral fables about human evil dressed up in the garb of social science.