To give myself a break from WWII books, I decided to take a look at this book, which I picked up at a used book sale a few days ago. As it turns out from the excessive amounts of writing in the margins, it was one of the textbooks for a mass killing and genocide history class that I had wanted to take when doing my BA but hadn't had the chance to.
Valentino divides the mass killings of the last hundred-odd years into six categories, and focuses on examples in the three main ones. Communist mass killings (USSR, China, and Cambodia), ethnic mass killings (Armenia, the Holocaust, and Rwanda), and counterinsurgency mass killings (Guatemala and Afghanistan in the 1980s). His basic conclusions are two-fold. First, that in no cases (not even the Holocaust) was the mass killing done for the sake of killing alone, and second, that in all cases the root of the killings can be traced to either a single leader or a small group of leaders.
To address that first point, he argues that the mass killings that resulted in all cases did so only after the regimes responsible had attempted other options and found that it was easier and/or cheaper to kill large numbers of people or that the deaths resulted as a part of social change. In the cases of the communist killings, widespread societal changes forced on the people led to starvation and repression of rebellion. That, combined with the imprisonment and murder of so-called enemies of the state resulted in the massive death tolls. Even in the cases of deliberate murder of a certain group (such as the kulaks in the USSR) they were not being killed for the sake of killing people, but because the regime viewed them as a threat (they weren't, obviously, but the regime believed they were). In the cases of the ethnic mass killings, in all cases the regimes ended up murdering enormous numbers of people after trying a number of other options first. They first tried expulsion, but that failed to reduce the population of the target group sufficiently. In Turkey/Armenia and Nazi-controlled Europe, they next tried segregation. Since that required the regimes to feed and shelter the target group, that was also deemed inefficient. Only then did they turn to directly killing on a wide scale. None of this excuses the actions of the regimes, of course, but it does provide insight as to how they arrived where they did (since even in Nazi Germany up until the end of 1940 top Nazi leadership still wanted to expel the Jewish population to a place like Siberia or Madagascar and had rejected systematic murder). Finally, in the case of counterinsurgency mass killing, regimes ended up killing large numbers of civilians in order to deprive guerrilla fighters of their base of support after trying to directly engage those fighters had failed.
For his second main point, he argues that there must be a combination of both a fanatical leader/group of leaders who genuinely believed in their cause (however perverted it might be) and a general passivity on the part of the general population. In the Holocaust, for example, the drive to kill the Jewish people was done by the leadership, mostly Hitler. The actual killing was done by a relatively small group (when compared to the population as a whole). The Nazi regime did not need the willing participation or even approval of the general population, they simply needed most of them not to care, and they needed those who did care to be too frightened for themselves and their families to do anything about it. Similar situations occurred in virtually all places where mass killings occurred.
Valentino also spends a portion of his book rejecting the most common assertion as to why mass killings occur, namely that there exist deep social cleavages between the group that is killed and the group that is doing the killing. He rejects this for two reasons. First, in many cases (particularly the communist killings) there were no real differences. The kulaks as an actual social group in Russia were mostly a figment of Stalin's imagination. In Cambodia, there were virtually no differences between the killers and the killed other than that most of the killed had once lived in the cities. Second, he rejects the social cleavage theory on the basis that if it were truly the reason for mass killings there would be a lot more than there have been. He points out, for example, that in the early part of the 20th century many European countries were as anti-Semitic if not more so than Germany, but it was only in Germany (and German-occupied regions), where there was a fanatically anti-Semitic leader bent on expanding German territories that the mass killings occurred.
For the most part I agree with Valentino's arguments, although I would argue that there were a number of things that he overlooked. The major one for me was that while his theory can be applied correctly to Germany and German-occupied western, southern, and northern Europe, I do not think it can be in eastern Europe. Many of the people there were not simply passive watchers, but active participants. The Nazis found huge numbers of volunteers in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and other countries who joined killing squads and willingly went to guard concentration camps. Those who did not enlist were often all too willing to inform on Jews in hiding (there were few examples of people in those countries hiding Jews or smuggling them to safety as there were in western and northern Europe). So in that case, the mass killings were not just attributable to a single fanatical leader but rather to a violently anti-Semitic population who had been given permission to kill Jews. The other small quibble I had was in his examination of the mass killings in Guatemala. While I think that he did a fairly good job of looking at it, he did not examine the role that foreign support (specifically the US) played in the killings. I think that it would have been valuable to look at whether or not the killings would have happened on the scale they did without foreign support. Overall, I very much enjoyed the book and I would recommend it. It's not light reading, but it's worth it.
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