The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective

Most of the contributors broach the differences between what constitutes genocide legally as opposed to what denotes mass murder; the 1948 UN Resolution on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide is reproduced in the appendix. This distinction has recently become more important with the advent of war crimes trials. Jay Winter's interesting article, "Under the Cover of War: The Armenia Genocide in the Context of Total War," argues that the Armenian example serves as a bridge that links the several cases of deportation and mass murder during the nineteenth century with those more violent and systematic episodes of genocide in the twentieth, "when the motives of ethnic greed and hatred were mobilized by unscrupulous elites in the context of total war" (p. 213). Winter points out some differences between the Armenian episode and the later incidences of ethnic cleansing, but in the end he sees more continuity. He also warns that total war serves both as an ideal cover and as a rationale for mass murder. In an intriguing look at a little-studied case of genocide, Isabel Hull investigates the killing of the Herero and Nama people in Southwest Africa at the hands of the German army in 1904. Here, Hull finds the tendency for killing built into military culture and points out that race too played a role (p. 160). One might ask then whether there was a variation between nineteenth-century imperialism, which exploited ideas of racial superiority without the concomitant idea of ethnic cleansing in most cases, and that of the twentieth century, when leaders and regimes were bent on exterminating marked groups of people. Was there anything about the 1900s that moved regimes from subjugating "the other" to mass murder? Reading Hull's study highlights the devastating consequences of colonialism in terms of the mind set it inculcated. This volume as a whole raises a few possibilities about whether genocide followed from imperialism or was noticeably different; the conclusions reached by the reader will, I am sure, vary.