Worse than War
Review by Hugh Carnegy
Published: January 18 2010 04:46 | Last updated: January 18 2010 04:46
Worse than War:
Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Little, Brown £25, 658 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20
Now that we can talk of the Holocaust, of Stalin’s terror and the Khmer Rouge, to name but a few, as being horrors of the last century, there is a tendency to think that we have put the worst of mankind’s hideous genocidal atrocities behind us.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s relentless, often hectoring but passionate new book, seeks to dispel such complacency. Today, he writes in his preface: “Hundreds of millions of people are at risk of becoming the victims of genocide and related violence.” This startling opening is emblematic of Goldhagen’s uncompromising approach. He sees no end to the appalling litany of “eliminationist” policies – from the German annihilation of the Herero people of South West Africa (now Namibia) in 1904, through the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, the Nazi Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward in China, mass killing in Rwanda to – in this century – genocide in Darfur. Nor does Goldhagen spare western democracies from his fierce analysis. Britain’s suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya is branded eliminationist. Truman is declared a “mass murderer” for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which Goldhagen insists Truman knew was militarily unnecessary.
Goldhagen came to prominence when, as a Harvard political scientist, he published Hitler’s Willing Executioner. In it, he asserted that the Holocaust was perpetrated willingly by thousands of ordinary Germans, motivated by deep-seated anti-Semitism, not just by a ruthless Nazi hard core. This is a theme which he develops in Worse than War, arguing that it is a common denominator in politically inspired genocide. He disdains theories such as that captured in Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” which, as he sees it, excuse the role of individuals by blaming bureaucratic structures or forced obedience to authority. In case after case, he shows that ordinary people choose to participate, and often do so with much greater brutality than required just to kill. Referring to specific incidents, he says: “Germans, British in Kenya, Indonesians, Khmer Rouge, Guatemalans, Tutsi in Burundi, Hutu in Rwanda, Serbs, Sudanese – butchered their victims.”
The book does not suggest that hordes of people will start slaughtering their neighbours unprompted. But it does assert that leaders determined on a course of eliminating an opposing group, be it ethnic or political, can exploit latent hatreds within a society to unleash genocidal action by a large body of the populace. This is a profoundly unsettling observation. It makes us question just how stable our comfortable societies really are.
Goldhagen’s more reassuring message is that genocide is not inevitable. He says there is no case in which genocidal action could not have been avoided if one or a few people in leadership positions had chosen to act otherwise. Democracy tends to be an inoculation against genocide. He points to instances of acute conflict where conditions for mass ethnic slaughter were ripe but never occurred, notably in South Africa during the struggle to end apartheid.
But how can the world act to prevent genocides? Here Goldhagen veers from the role of moralistic historian/sociologist to moralistic political advocate – and, frankly, loses the plot.
First, he argues that “today’s most dangerous eliminationist political movement” is what he labels “Political Islam” (his capitals). Undoubtedly, al-Qaeda is a lethal movement with a track record of committing mass murder; Iran’s president has called for the elimination of Israel – and seems set upon acquiring the nuclear weapons to add chilling credibility to that threat. These must be confronted. But Goldhagen’s insistence on lumping all Islamic militant groups under one label – from Hamas in Gaza, to Iran, Somalia and the Taliban – bestows on them a coherence and unity that is overstated and which ignores the complexity of the different conflicts in which they are engaged and how the west deals with them.
Goldhagen also launches a withering attack on the UN, decrying its preponderance of non-democratic and tyrannical members and calling it an “enabler” of mass murder. Instead, he advocates the establishment of a new “United Democratic Nations” – as called for by John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008. Democratic nations should unite to take action against mass murderers, Goldhagen argues, by political means and military intervention. It is, to say the least, bold to advocate this after the examples of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even if we accept that these interventions were hopelessly organised and executed, the mess that has ensued for both invader and invaded should give us pause before charging after every murderous despot. Goldhagen’s vision of the “UDN” collapses when he argues that China and Russia would have to be included. Did he not notice how obstructionist China, supplier of arms to the Sudanese regime, was on UN intervention in Darfur, a tragedy Goldhagen attacks the organisation for not preventing?
Worse than War, published in the US last year and now available in the UK, is a reminder that genocide is not a thing of the past. But its prescription for a cure is too much to swallow.
Hugh Carnegy is the FT’s executive editor
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