 | Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times—is among his most important achievements. Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides. |
Average Customer Rating:   Truth, Informative, educational The book is very long, very comprehensive. It's a book to study and to learn from. The author is beyond description in excellence and devotion to his work. An intricate but broad study of a universal subject. I have sent this outstanding history to a college in Kenya. It should be disseminated widely as it is a unique and thorough analysis of a world-wide tragedy. Important But Uneven Ben Kiernan is the leading authority on the Cambodian genocide. He compiled and analyzed a good deal of the primary source material related to the Cambodian genocide and his books are essential reading on that topic. This very ambitious book displays both Kiernan's strengths and weaknesses as a scholar and writer.
Like Kiernan's prior books, Blood and Soil is based on a great deal of careful scholarly work. In the case of Blood and Soil, this is mainly a careful reading of an enormous amount of secondary literature which he attempts to distill into an analysis of genocide. In this process, Kiernan attempts to provide a summary narrative of many of the most horrifying episodes in human history. This is the strength of the book. Many of these episodes, such as the conquest of what is now southern Vietnam, the horrors that accompanied the unification of Japan, German imperialism in Southwest Africa, or the genocidal activity of the Pakistani army in what is now Bangladesh, will be unknown to most readers. Several of his descriptions of better known events, such as colonial American genocidal activities against native Americans, the extermination of Tasmanian aborigines, the crimes of Mao's regime, Japanese imperialism in China, and the Armenian genocide, are concise and insightful.
This book also exhibits Kiernan's weaknesses. Kiernan is not as strong an analyst as he a compiler. Kiernan opens Blood and Soil with an analytical chapter which he uses to set the stage for the rest of the book. Kiernan uses the definitions of genocide established in recent international conventions to define his subject. This is reasonable as it provides a uniform standard to judge crimes across a broad swath of history. He admits, however, that these definitions don't fit some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century, notably the enormous murders of the Stalinist and Maoist states. Indeed, by these definitions, its been argued (by Pol Pot's biographer Philip Short) that the Cambodian genocide was not strictly speaking, a genocide. Kiernan, nonetheless, includes large chapters on the crimes of Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China. These chapters appropriate for a book on the great crimes of humanity but their inclusion call into question his interpretative framework.
Kiernan argues that genocides are associated with common ideological features - racism, a preoccupation with an idealized past, territorial expansionism, and preoccupation with agrarianism as a core social value. Much of Blood and Soil is an attempt to identify these themes across an considerable range of genocides in human history. Kiernan argues that these traits are in fact ancient and arise in variety of civilizations. Kiernan's argument seems to apply to many historical situations. It fits the Holocaust quite well, can be applied easily to European colonial expansions, and Kiernan has very interesting discussions of these themes in the Armenian genocide, Japanese imperialism in China, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. But, are they really universal. Kiernan himself points out that the ongoing Darfur genocide is being carried out by pastoralists against peasants, the reverse of his model. Kiernan's themes apply poorly to the crimes of the Leninist-Stalinist state and to Mao's China, a point which he concedes explictly. It appears that his analytic categories have limited range.
Kiernan never discusses the extent to which these ideological features are results of conquest and violence rather than causes. No one who has read about the Holocaust or the Cambodian genocide can deny the power of brutal ideology. But at least in the case of colonial expansions, these kinds of ideologies could be after the fact justifications. It is, as Tacitus wrote, "human nature to despise those you have injured."
Kiernan introduces his analysis in part because he is interested in identifying factors that might predict genocidal regimes. His examination of the history of Rwanda in the years leading up to the genocide would seem to bear him out. On the other hand, his proposed factors would have been useless in predicting the crimes of Lenin and Stalin. One doesn't need the themes described by Kiernan to predict that imperialist-colonial expansion will result in ethnic cleansing. The simple desire to occupy the lands of others is a more than sufficient explanation.
Finally, while this book is written better than his books on Cambodia, the quality of writing is far from outstanding. Kiernan's narrative sections are invariably clear but there are times when the simple narrative overpowers his attempts at presenting his analytic themes. A shorter book concentrating on the analysis with a shorter selection of genocides as examples of his themes would have been more readable and potentially more convincing. To be really successful, Kiernan would have to have presented some analysis in which he tabulated genocides and these assessed how many actually exhibited the themes he identifies.
Finally, I dislike the fact that there is no separate bibliography. Sources are described only in the Notes. A seperate reference list would have made this book easier to use as a reference volume. This is probably the publisher attempting to contain costs, which is regrettable. Genocidists, says Aussie historian, tell big fibs This remarkable but harrowing encyclopedia of genocide could induce repetition strain, outraged denials, possibly even a sorrowful yearning to join a kinder species.
After Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide", postwar United Nations defined this as "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnical, or religious group". Ben Kiernan, a Yale-based Australian historian, takes his main title from an ideological tract of 1930s Germany. The first two parts review "imperial and colonial" slaughters up to the early 20th century while the third considers a "multiplicity" of subsequent genocides. Kiernan's summation of the Third Reich restates his four perceived correlates of state-linked killing: "The Nazi killing machine" was "operated by interlocking ideological levers that celebrated race, territory, cultivation, and history".
To make his case, the author is forever splicing unexpected and illuminating primary-source threads that come from years of practice. I was comfortable with his limited material on the recent past and substantial reluctance to forecast the near future. Yet I kept thinking of the elephant (I mean, the anthropoid) in the room - our evolution and biology.
The durable pre-Christian state of Sparta is typecast as "secretive, militaristic, expansionist" and as a source of myth for the short-lived Reich. Another potent idea surfacing early is that, by accident or design, artists and intellectuals supply lethal ammunition for politicians and generals. So you read Cato the Censor's famous interdiction against Carthage, but also Hesiod's and Virgil's poetry of the plough.
Early Christian and Jewish writers, argues Kiernan, shunned racialist thinking, with the term "race" only becoming prominent in medieval times. In the first of his case studies, he finds the Spaniards plumbing "intellectual depths" for God's consent to the Central American conquest. But he also reveals the to-and-fro of contemporary debate. Various citations from the early 1500s regret the Mexican and Guatemalan bloodbaths.
"War" commingles with "genocide" in the East Asian examples. National role-reversals and repetitions become familiar. Under a metaphorical alliance of "writing and chariots", the Buddhist kingdom of Dai Viet crushes its formerly competitive rival Champa, only to pay a heavy price later. Inspired by "ancient precedents", Japan of the 1500s assaults Korea, but "genocide abroad" is a harbinger for "violent cultural suppression at home". Japan reappears in the context of its 20th century Chinese and Pacific incursions.
The chronicle of England's 16th-century Irish depredations resonates. A cabal of Elizabethan "neo-cons" appears to agitate, not only for rivers of tears in Ireland, but also for the later miseries of indigenous America and Australia. Although Elizabeth herself is "parsimonious" in support, there follow martial law and massacre. In the peculiar logic of extermination, the Irish locals don't quite cut it as proper yeomen, but kill one and you could go for the lot.
Blood and Soil implies an 80-90 per cent decline from all causes in the indigenous North American (Australian) population over 1492-1800 (1788-1901). It suited English settlers in eastern America to discount the agricultural Native American settlements they displaced. But the "genteel, controlled, expanding rural idyll" of early 1700s Virginia could "explode in genocidal rage". George Washington's late 1700s war secretary writes that colonial settlement has been "even more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru". The Jeffersonian democracy, in Kiernan's view, required Native Americans to yield up "their lifestyle, their lands, or their lives - without the vote." Once the Cherokee nation is erased, the California indigenes are trampled in the dashes for "scientific racism" and precious gold.
Next come the wars and woes of Australian settlement. Up to Federation, the author estimates that "multiple deliberate killings" by squatters, mounted police and others accounted for 20,000 Aborigines. He concedes that frontier interactions were diverse and some settlers abhorred the violence. But with racial "science" casting Aboriginals as inferior nomads, "classical pastoralism" and government directives could drive an ideological program to convert indigenous lands.
Denialism continues in Australia and elsewhere. This, I note, includes an animus towards "Genocide Studies" and the broad UN definition of genocide. Call it or count it as you will, the evidence repeated here is part of Australian history. It is that colonial agencies condoned or sometimes conducted the "dispersals", which were aired in their assemblies, investigations, reports and journals.
The cynical collateral damage of the American and Australian land-rushes is distinguishable from the following Armenian and Holocaust slaughters. Typically, Kiernan first explains lebensraum, a geographer's neologism to accompany Germany's South West African occupation around the turn of the 20th century. From there, he picks at the rancid racial fears and florid territorial fantasies of Hitler, Himmler and supporting theoreticians.
Sustained by myths of Sparta, Rome, and ancient Germany, Hitler could claim his ancestors were "all peasants" and impose a Germans-only Hereditary Farm Law. It is often remarked that citizens not psychopaths were the Nazi functionaries. Kiernan doesn't go there much, apart from his neat opening point that genocidal enterprises require both "apocalyptic vision and prudent compromise". What he does illustrate is the even bigger territorial-ethnic engineering scheme the Reich had waiting in the wings.
Soviet Russia is portrayed both as Nazi victim, and Stalinist perpetrator of its own monumental program against the kulaks and the elite. But China is said to have exacted a famine toll far in excess of Stalin's. I'll leave the experts to determine whether state famine equals genocide.
Blood and Soil concludes by touring the post-1950 killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Indonesia, Pakistan (in Bangladesh), Guatemala (once again), Saddam's Iraq, Bosnia, and Sudan (Darfur). The Khmer Rouge rhetoric is compared and contrasted with that of Rwanda's Hutu Power.
At the outset, Kiernan guesses that the 21st century might be "bleak". He also nods to the surprising evidence that the genocide (or war or murder) toll is trending downwards relative to population. At the end, he remains convinced of his four great genocidal narratives. But surely his outstanding demonstration is that all through history the narrators of these themes are telling fibs. To what extent then are the themes correlates or causal factors in mass killing?
The book, as it happens, cites the biological metaphors of genocide rather than the underlying biology. I believe that more of an interweaving from evolution, culture and technology would sharpen the expositions emerging from genocide studies. The human lineage, after all, appears to have been evolving and deploying its uncommon adaptation of territorial inter-group violence since Paleolithic times. When Carthage finally fell in 146 BC, it was long after men in militias had first sacked settlements, but long before six billion humans had stormed the planet.
(Canberra Times, May 2008) Something new This book, while it may be wrong on several things, nonetheless adds a great deal to our understanding of genocide. Many books on genocide look only to the 20th century and begin either with the German campaigns against the Herrero in Africa or with the Armenian genocide. This book goes deeper. it looks all the way back to ancient Sparta and then take shte reader through the destruction of native people in the New World. In places such as Hispanola the native popualtion declined from a million to a mere 10,000 in a few decades.
But the real gem of this book is that it examines the genocides that are rarely if every written about such as the Vietnamese conqest of Champa and the destruction of the Chams who wer Hindu while the Vietnamese were Buddhist. This is a fascinating story and it is the opener to a whole chapter on Southeast Asia which paints a very interesting picture of that area and its formation of nation states.
Seth J. Frantzman |  |
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