This book presents a new theory of ethnic cleansing based on the most horrific cases—colonial genocide, Armenia, the Nazi Holocaust, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda—and cases of less violence—early modern Europe, modern India, and Indonesia. Understanding this complex process helps us devise policies to avoid ethnic cleansing in the future. Indeed, it was in the name of the progress of civilization that he declared that.
Yet he and his colleague Adolf Hitler said that they were only following the Americans. As we shall see, perpetrators of ethnic cleansing do not descend among us as a separate species of evildoers.
The Argument
Many Americans and Australians have committed murderous purges in the past; some Jews and Armenians – the most victimized peoples of the 20th century – committed recent atrocities against Palestinians and Azeris (and in turn, some of these victim groups are also perpetrators). But two much simpler views dominate - the perpetrators are entire ethnic groups or state elites. Cigar (1995) makes his view of the Yugoslav ethnic wars clear with subtitles such as "The Serbs Sense of Superiority" and "The Serbs as a Threatened Nation." I label these views as nationalist since they are nationalists who claim that the nation is a single actor.
In periods of ethnic tension, the group may already have somewhat negative opinions about the outgroup. Later in the process, control over the means of communication can provide greater ideological power to ethno-nationalists.
Ethnic Cleansing in Former Times
The Assyrian Empire was founded on highly trained infantrymen recruited from peasants in the heartland of the empire. There may have been more Jews in Spain than in all of the rest of Christian Europe. In the words of the edict, Jews would no longer "pervert faithful Christians from the holy Catholic faith". The monarchs said local expulsions had failed.
A handful of leaders were executed and several hundred soldiers were transported to the New World. But overall, this was not a phase of purification that could be attributed to democratization – apart from that of the soul.
Two Versions of “We, the People”
The population consisted of the lower classes, the crowd, the rabble – out-groups who were definitely not part of the people. Debates over franchise expansion have been dominated by issues such as these: where to draw the ownership line. They recognized that English was a high language, the language of rule, of the professions and of commerce.
In the Third Spanish Republic of the 1930s, there were separate Catalan and Basque nationalist parties of the left, center and right. These distinctive historical forms can be very useful for the much more multi-ethnic countries of the global south today. The advocacy of limited property franchises of the early Anglo-American type was thus overwhelmed by more popular demands.
It aptly describes the ideology of the many nationalisms threatened by a more powerful imperial enemy. During 1881–3, Jews were scapegoated for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, as a Jew was one of the assassins. Minorities were expected to move to a state where they would be part of the ethnic majority.
The secretary of the League, the Habsburg historian Charles Macartney, got to the heart of the problem. In Eastern Europe, the subordinate nationalities decreased from half to a quarter of the population. But the most dangerous feature of the early interwar period was that prominent conservatives were moving towards organic nationalism.
Genocidal Democracies in the New World
These were examples of indigenous ideological explanations of the great difference and the superiority of European economic, military, political and biological power - the main thrust of ideological power. Such resistance brought massive retaliation by whites who called for "the extermination of the black devils". At least 20,000 natives, perhaps many more, were killed by the settlers in sporadic border skirmishes that lasted into the 1920s, some of which took the form of killing sprees. Their bodies then floated past the Settlement." The theft was later traced to a white employee (Rowley.
There developed what Rowley called the triangle of tension between the settlers, the missionaries and the British government – the settlers being the harshest, the churchmen favoring conversion and reconciliation, and the government favoring compromise. John Winthrop described the smallpox epidemic of 1617 as God's way of "thinning out" the native population. Minnesota Governor Ramsey declared: "The Sioux Indians must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state." This became a popular slogan: "Exterminate or banish." His militia commander was General Sibley, a former fur trader known for defrauding the Indians and the federal government.
Jackson spoke out on other occasions against “deceitful” and “relentless barbarians” – “the blood of our murdered countrymen must be avenged.” Sheridan replied, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Sheridan is credited with inventing what had already become an old saw in the West. But what should I do with the Third Colorado Regiment if I make peace? replied the governor.
The Kazakhs and other nomads were "destroying" the lands and had to give way to the Russian high peasant agriculture. Any sign of resistance brought dire fears of being overrun by the "dark savages." The mere hint of native resistance led the settlers to inflict savage punishments. He added, "against non-humans war cannot be waged humanely" and later claimed that "the Emperor said only that he expected me to crush the rebellion by fair or foul means" (Drechsler, 1980:154).
He wrote: "The enemy numbered 600, including women and children, and we completely annihilated them, not even leaving a baby to cry for its mother." With these qualifications regarding intent and confusion in mind, genocide was the first murderous consequence in modern times of rule by us, the people – the first truly dark side of democracy.
Armenia, I
Into the Danger Zone
Russian expansion now posed the greatest threat to the survival of the Ottoman Empire. An Asian power, Japan, inflicted the first decisive modern defeat on a European power - the great enemy of the Ottomans, Russia. The CUP appealed to the more modern, less religious parts of the empire and was allied with other ethnonationalists.
I am more inclined to believe that the unrest escalated largely because of weakness and divisions in the regime. The cabinet exonerated the Armenians, declaring them to be "victims of the spread of suspicions and baseless provocations". The Young Turks were now turning to organic nationalism and radicalizing the repressive heart of the state.
The loss of territories ratified by the peace treaties reduced the ethno-religious diversity of the empire. Nazim (a graduate of the Military Medical School) argued: "The Ottoman state must be exclusively Turkish. One remembers adults in Sivas who spoke fondly of "Uncle Christian", i.e. Russia: "the hope of salvation for the Armenians of Anatolia would be the arrival of the Russian army" (Bedoukian, 1978:7; cf. Jafarian Kazanjian, 1989:48).
To the radicals, Armenians appeared to be political enemies of the state and ethnic enemies of the Turanian nation. They knew the terrain, the disposition of the Turkish forces and the sympathies of the local population. In 1908, the Young Turks and Armenian nationalists had been allies, the Young Turks' plan A.
Armenia, II
Genocide
These last two escalations were coordinated from the top, in the offices of Talaat, Minister of the Interior, and Enver, Minister of War. Most of the local men were sent south to the town of Deir Zor in the Syrian desert. In reality, most of the men were only deported to the nearest abandoned area, where they were killed.
6 The second (1972) edition of the Bryce Report adds an appendix identifying the places and people described in the report. There was some disagreement at the highest level, although the sources differ on the identity of the leading dissenter. The detailed evidence of the Circassian officer, Hassan Amdja, confirms Djemal's moderation in the summer of 1916.
The reshuffle probably involved over a third of the senior officials in the places where most Armenians were killed. In the second phase of the genocide, many officers faced a choice between political extermination and professional protection of Armenian labor. It appears to have been at the core of the radical faction of the CUP from at least 1913 onwards.
Special Forces may have carried out most of the killings of Armenians - with "animal brutality". They were apparently jealous of the greatest wealth of local Armenian merchants - the "national bourgeoisie" in waiting. De Nogales said, “the Young Turks, to give them their due, had been honest until the beginning of the war.
Armenian traitors found a niche for themselves in the bosom of the fatherland; they were dangerous microbes. There was also as much bribery as bureaucracy in the organization of the deportations.
Nazis, I
Radicalization
But in Germany, only ethnic Germans, wherever they live, are surely considered full members of the German nation. This is considered to be the root of the German problem, because it is more exclusionary than civic nationalism. This conflict was intensified by the flight to Habsburg lands of Orthodox Jews from the massacres of the Russian Empire.
German fear of Eastern Slavs and Jews increased at the end of the 19th century. Thus, the Nazis rose in free elections and won more than a third of the vote, leaving only the Socialists and Communists as the major opposition. This is only true from the point of view of the Nazis themselves, as the Jews were not really plotting to establish their own state in German lands.
In 1938, Kristallnacht and the Austrian Anschluss briefly focused Nazi fury on Jews, but the following year this was overshadowed by the start of the first systematic killings in the so-called euthanasia project, codenamed T4 (after the Berlin headquarters address, 4Tiergartenstrasse ). As Poles watched the extermination of the Jews, many believed that they would be next for genocide after the war (Gordon Gutman, 1990). In reality, the Nazis planned a more mixed fate for them: political ideals for up to a third, segregation for another third, and wild deportations of the rest to Russia.
The Italian author Malaparte, traveling with the German forces, provides a graphic eyewitness account of the policy. Most of the victims were in the East, but extermination was just as merciless in the West. I identify planners and perpetrators and try to discern their intentions at each stage of the process.