[Bilimsel Haber] Book review: A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Eric D. Weitz. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 360 pp. Index, $45. 00
(cloth), ISBN 0-6910-0913-9; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-6911-2271-7.
*
Reviewed by:* Wendy Theodore, Africana Studies, University of Arizona.
*Published by:* H-Genocide <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egenocide>
(September, 2005)



Conceptualizing Race in the Study of Genocide

Eric Weitz seeks to move scholarship on genocide away from a focus on
individual cases to a cross-case, comparative analysis. Towards these
ends, Weitz, in his work A Century of Genocide, thoughtfully examines
and compares how ideologies of race and nation contributed to four
twentieth-century genocides: the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin,
Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, and Serbia during the
Bosnian War. One central conclusion of the book, that these genocides
were not inevitable, is well supported by the cases. Weitz paints a
complex picture of how a number of factors had to combine in order for
these regimes to move from discriminatory practices to mass murder in
their desire to reshape society. He argues that these regimes ordered
killings during times of extreme social instability and crisis; that the
regimes were supported by the public and the destructive input of
lower-level officials; and that most of the killings took place under
the cover of war.

Working from recent scholarship on race and racial formation, Weitz
argues that by the twentieth century, history and race had become "the
most prevalent and powerful forms of articulating the differences among
people and of organizing political and social systems" (p. 32). Due in
part to initial categorizing of groups under colonial expansion and the
formal categorization of human groups with the development of
anthropology, race became the "hardest and most exclusive form of
identity" in the modern period: "indelible, immutable, and
transgenerational" characteristics, thought to be transmitted through
blood, were assigned by outsiders to every member of the "different"
race (p. 21). Race, however, cannot be reduced to skin color; it is "the
assignment of indelible traits to particular groups." Weitz contends,
then, that any group can be "racialized" in "particular historical
moments and places" (p. 21).

European nations, to avoid granting political rights to colonial
subjects, turned to culture as the "the defining element in the
formation of the nation" (p. 31). German theorists argued that nations
were constituted by the primordial ties of people through language and
culture. Groups with similar pasts became races by virtue of land and
language separate from others. Thus racial exclusion bound the nation.
The exploitative and public acts of brutalization that accompanied
imperialism, along with eugenics, served to rationalize the domination
of subject races; lesser races were to serve the strong. By the start of
World War I, race and nationalism "had become predominant and pervasive
in the West" (p. 50). Moreover, the essential features of the
war--disrespect for human life, the use of political violence, the
tolerance of wholesale death and destruction, and the ideology of race
and nation that attached to powerful states during World War I--are all
features of the genocides Weitz studies.

World War I, then, with its creation of an "aesthetics of violence" (p.
52), provides the crucial backdrop for the first two cases, the Soviet
and German genocides. Weitz's study proceeds chronologically and each
case is compared across five main factors: power and utopia; the
categorization of the population; history up to the genocide; the
trajectory of the genocide; and finally, how each case meets the UN
definition of genocide. The case studies are designed to allow the
reader to compare across cases and Weitz directs the reader to
similarities and differences among cases.

Weitz argues that the Soviets committed genocide because the conditions
of ethnic group deportation/resettlement would, in accord with the UN
definition, destroy these groups in part. The Soviet's utopian vision
required the massive overhaul of society into a powerful modern state.
Workers, peasants, and "lishentsy" (political enemies and the "Kulaks")
were the first groups targeted for mass deportations between 1919 and
1933. During the Great Terror of 1936-1938, Soviet policy and the
unchecked rise of Stalin, which combined to engender massive societal
chaos exacerbated by the start of World War II and the Nazi invasion,
moved "population politics [to a] more radical level" (p. 72). Under the
cover of war, the Soviet's Russification policy provided the
rationalization for the removal of nationals through the identification
of non-ethnic Russians with collectivities beyond Soviet borders as
"enemy nations" (p. 84). Weitz argues that until 1937 the Soviets
believed that deportees could be reformed through camp labor. For ethnic
nationals, however, the Soviets jettisoned the idea of reform after
1937, and attempted to erase all visible traces of the groups' existence
after removal. Weitz concludes that these removals, which were "more
total in nature" (p. 91), meet the UN definition of genocide because the
Soviets "imposed conditions of life that they knew would result in
severely high mortality rates" (p. 101).

The genocide in Nazi Germany, Weitz argues, was the clearest case of the
UN definition of genocide to destroy physically a group in whole (p.
140). The Nazis envisioned a racially pure society of domination and
subordination (p. 109). The Nazis viewed race conflict as the motor of
history, so they "required race purification that could be accomplished
only through war since the Aryan race could flourish only through war"
(p. 113). Unlike the Soviets, therefore, for the Nazis the "link between
ideology and population removals" was immediate and direct (p. 59). Yet
Weitz contends that the Holocaust, despite eight years of Nazi
discrimination against the target populations of Jews and Romas as well
as the blanket group of "asocials," was not detectable even as late as
1941. The order to destroy all Jewish people was given in 1942, after
the systematic killings in Eastern Europe had already begun. According
to Weitz, with this order the Nazi regime became genocidal: the violence
reached a level where "the actual physical annihilation of defined
population groups moved to the very core of state policies, and all the
normal aspects of governance retreated to the shadows" (p. 12). Thus,
Weitz argues that it was the twin processes of the euphoria of victory
in World War II and recognition of defeat in the Soviet Union that
"created the Holocaust" (p. 132).

Weitz suggests that a clear "vision of a communist utopia" was integral
to the Cambodian genocide of ethnic nationals between 1976 and 1979 (p.
158). The Khmer, also classified as a genocidal regime by Weitz, sought
to create a "homogeneous, perfect society" (p. 145) that was
self-sufficient and modern. The killing began with the forced removal of
all city-dwellers or "new people" into the countryside, which was
intended to level the population and provide labor for farming
collectivization. The result was widespread suffering, starvation, and
the deliberate murder of thousands of new people by lower-level cadres
who thought they were working on behalf of a higher command. Like the
Soviets, Khmer policies led to social dislocation and economic suffering
in the first two years, that intensified after 1977 when war with
Vietnam loomed on the horizon and the regime set out to destroy all
those who held to their traditional beliefs and ways of life. Khmer
ideology constructed the Vietnamese, the Chams, and the Chinese as
incapable of reform so these groups had to be removed. Weitz suggests
also that the Khmer began to view the removal of the "enemy" groups as
redemptive: "only through the elimination of the Vietnamese would Khmers
be able to reach utopia" (p. 173). In the end, over fifty percent of all
ethnic nationals were killed. This genocide of part of Cambodia's ethnic
peoples resulted in the largest population decline of any country since
1945.

The Serbian genocide against Muslims in Bosnia in the early 1990s
"revolved around the desperate measures of an old elite to stay in
business" (p. 230). The Serbs, with the living memory of genocide
perpetrated against them in World War II, argued that their fate in a
multi-ethnic state would be genocide. Weitz contends that in the
breakdown of the former Yugoslavia Serb, nationalism was the "most
explosive" (p. 201) and that the Serbs were "the driving force behind
the dissolution of Yugoslavia" (p. 209). Therefore, the Serb goal, to
establish a homogeneous state, was to be accomplished through the
violent, forced removal of Muslims and Croats from Bosnia. Serb
activists and the military and political leadership in Belgrade pushed
each other into new extremes of violence by "supporting one another
ideologically and materially" (p. 212). The Serb genocide, like that of
the Khmer Rouge, was stopped by outside forces; however, not before the
Serbs had killed thousands of Muslim Bosnians--an act that brought into
common use the term ethnic cleansing.

Unfortunately, A Century of Genocide's framework for analyzing genocide
and the UN framework for classifying genocide may be based on different
understandings of race. Weitz's definition, which moves away from
mid-twentieth-century understandings of race as phenotype, allows him to
argue that groups can be racialized by the hierarchical assignment of
indelible traits. The UN's definition of race appears to be wedded to
phenotype: political classes and groups cannot be victims of genocide
and the categorization of the four identified groups--race, religion,
nationality, and/or ethnicity--presumes that the categories are
analytically distinct. If we accept the argument that all groups can be
racialized at specific moments then Weitz appears to be arguing against
the Convention's definition. Thus Weitz's understanding of race has
profound implications for his expressed purpose of using his analysis
"as a guide to other cases and warning signs for the future" (p. 15).
How can this be done? Weitz convincingly shows how each case moved from
discrimination to mass murder to cross the Convention's threshold for
genocide. He also shows that states' attitudes toward racialized groups
are an early warning sign for genocide. But before Weitz's framework can
be applied we need to attend to the problems that arise from differences
in racial group classification.

For example, in the Soviet case Weitz chooses not to define deportations
of the Cossacks as genocide, yet he clearly classifies them as a racial
group and there is sufficient evidence in his work to show that the
Soviet intent was to destroy in part. Weitz writes: "'Cossack' came to
mean anti-Soviet, a synonym for 'enemy' that carried an implicit
racialization of a group defined not even by ethnicity but by its
special service relationship to the czarist state" (p. 69). Noting that
between 1919 and 1920, 300,000-500,000 Cossacks out of three million
were killed or died through deportation, Weitz suggests only that "A
barrier had been broken ... which demonstrated how easy it was to
condemn a particular group in its entirety and to presume that every
single member of the group was a real or potential opponent, no matter
what actions an individual had undertaken" (p. 69). But by Weitz's
framework, this broken barrier should count as genocide.

This curious reticence is also present in Weitz's rich detailing of the
Khmer Rouge's murderous policies. City-dwellers could not escape their
classification, and were purged and murdered on that basis. However,
Weitz states only that "The Khmer Rouge racialized class and
nationality, making all members of the three [main ethnic] groups
bearers of identical characteristics, no matter what they had done"
(emphasis added, p. 175). Moreover, he suggests that "once the Soviet
state defined every single Korean as a security risk, once the Khmer
Rouge began to treat all Chinese and Vietnamese in Cambodia as, ipso
facto, enemies of the state, then those states had 'racialized'
identities that initially were 'merely' class or ethnic in origin" (p.
238). Yet again, this does not in of itself exclude groups from being
racialized that do not meet the UN definition of a racial group.

What traits, then, are shared by the groups that Weitz designates as
genocide victims given his expanded definition of race? The common
denominator appears to be that the state determined at a particular
moment in time that certain groups were no longer amenable to reform.
Even the Nazis, Weitz contends, initially transported Jews, Roma people,
and "asocials" for reeducation with the caveat that those incapable of
reform were to be "annihilated through labor and euthanasia" (p. 122).
Why certain groups were deemed beyond reform was specific to the
circumstances of each case, although again Weitz highlights some
similarities: the exigencies of security policy under war (the Soviets,
the Nazis, and the Khmer Rouge); historical discrimination
(anti-Semitism in Europe and anti-Vietnamese sentiment in Cambodia); or
the desire for a racially homogeneous state as in the cases of the
Nazis, Khmers, and the Serbs.

Weitz's study of twentieth-century genocides has moved the study of
genocide in an interesting direction by focusing on the categories of
race and nation in cross-case comparative analysis. Most importantly,
Weitz's engagement of race-critical theories will allow us to
investigate genocide and the utility of the Convention's classifications
in light of new thinking about race. Clearly there is reason to move
cautiously on comparative work on race until the apparent ambiguities of
old and new definitions are further examined. However, students of
genocide, new and established, will find this book a useful starting
point for engaging the wealth of comparative factors that Weitz
delineates and expertly presents.



Citation: Wendy Theodore. "Review of Eric D. Weitz, A Century of
Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation," H-Genocide, H-Net Reviews,
September, 2005. URL:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=295151169496749.