The Crime of All Crimes

Toward a Criminology of Genocide

Nicole Rafter

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781479845187, 9781479859481
• eBook ISBN: 9781479805969
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: Social Sciences

Cambodia. Rwanda. Armenia. Nazi Germany. History remembers these places as the sites of unspeakable crimes against humanity, and indisputably, of genocide. Yet, throughout the twentieth century, the world has seen many instances of violence committed by states against certain groups within their borders—from the colonial ethnic cleansing the Germans committed against the Herero tribe in Africa, to the Katyn Forest Massacre, in which the Soviets shot over 20, 000 Poles, to anti-communist mass murders in 1960s Indonesia. Are mass crimes against humanity like these still genocide? And how can an understanding of crime and criminals shed new light on how genocide—the "crime of all crimes"—transpires? In The Crime of All Crimes, criminologist Nicole Rafter takes an innovative approach to the study of genocide by comparing eight diverse genocides--large-scale and small; well-known and obscure—through the lens of criminal behavior. Rafter explores different models of genocidal activity, reflecting on the popular use of the Holocaust as a model for genocide and ways in which other genocides conform to different patterns. For instance, Rafter questions the assumption that only ethnic groups are targeted for genocidal "cleansing, " and she also urges that actions such as genocidal rape be considered alongside traditional instances of genocidal violence. Further, by examining the causes of genocide on different levels, Rafter is able to construct profiles of typical victims and perpetrators and discuss means of preventing genocide, in addition to delving into the social psychology of genocidal behavior and the ways in which genocides are brought to an end. A sweeping and innovative investigation into the most tragic of events in the modern world, The Crime of All Crimes will fundamentally change how we think about genocide in the present day.

1

Genocide, Criminology, and Evolution of the “Crime of Crimes”

The Katyn Forest Genocide, 1940

In the spring of 1940, 22,000 citizens of Poland—mainly officers of the Polish army, police officers, and prominent intellectuals—were systematically executed by members of Josef Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, in what became known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. The mass slaughter began as soon as the ground, near the camps where the prisoners were held in western Russia, was soft enough to dig pits for the bodies. Due to the great secrecy of the massacre, no one knows exactly where all of these men (and one woman—a second lieutenant) were killed, although skeletal remains show that most were executed with a shot to the back of the neck that went up through the brain and out the skull near the eyes. Eyewitnesses later reported that many victims had been shot in a soundproofed basement room by a NKVD executioner wearing a butcher’s apron, hat, and long gloves—to protect himself from blood and spattering brains. He was able to kill about 250 Poles a night. Their bodies were then buried in neat rows, one on top of another, in mass graves; one grave site, in the northwest Soviet Union, was in the Katyn (pronounced KA-tin) Forest, which gave the massacre its name.1

Few of the victims suspected what lay in store for them, for the Soviets had beguiled their prisoners with rumors of release. Some left their prison camps to the music of marching bands; apparently the Soviets were helping celebrate their release. Others were given typhus shots as though to protect them on their journey home. They did not realize that Stalin and his Politburo had condemned them to death; nor did anyone in Poland know about their fate. Their families were hurriedly deported to the far north, where many of them died from hunger or the cold. The prisoners’ disappearance was a mystery that the entire Polish nation struggled to solve for the next fifty years. This was a secret genocide.

Because the victims of the event seem so different from those of the Holocaust—the popular template for genocide—many who read about the Katyn Forest Massacre might be reluctant to term it a genocide. Yet it fits the United Nations’ definition of genocide as an act “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”—meaning as a group with those characteristics.2 The Soviet Union had recently annexed the eastern half of Poland; Stalin planned to incorporate the land into the Soviet Union, erasing that part of Poland entirely or turning it into a satellite state. Yet, because his plans were unknown, when the Soviets captured a large number of Poles—army officers, reservists, professors, lawyers, engineers, and artists who recently had been mobilized into the Polish army—the bewildered prisoners barely resisted, for they had no idea that they were at war. Nevertheless, when spies later secretly interrogated them in the prison camps, they insisted on their loyalty to Poland. Stalin and his Politburo, certain that these Polish patriots, if freed, would resist the Soviet takeover of their country, eventually condemned them to death.3

“Stalin was a pioneer of national mass murder,” writes the historian Timothy Snyder, “and the Poles were the preeminent victims among the Soviet nationalities.”4 The Soviets mistrusted these particular Poles for reasons of ethnicity, nationality, social class (they were educated “bourgeoisie”), and politics. Their removal from Poland and later liquidation was, as Snyder puts it, “a kind of decapitation of Polish society.”5

But although the Katyn Forest Massacre meets the UN’s first criterion for genocide—it was intended to destroy, “in whole or in part,” a national group—it differs in so many respects from the Holocaust that even genocide scholars rarely mention it.

Goals of This Book

The omission of the Katyn Forest Massacre from discussions of genocide—common but unfounded—leads directly to a central question of this book: What do genocides look like? Do most or all of them in fact resemble the Holocaust? If not, what—if anything—do genocides have in common? I devote much of the book to answering this question. A second key question asks how genocides have evolved over time. But let me begin by explaining what I hope to accomplish in this book. My goals are

• • to identify the changing contours of genocide across the twentieth century through comparative study of eight genocides;
• • to draw conclusions about the causes of genocide on the basis of comparisons of these eight disparate genocides; and
• • to probe the ways in which criminology might contribute to better understanding of the crime of genocide.

I have structured the research to examine genocide as a generic phenomenon—comparing genocides to see if typical patterns appear—and to investigate genocide as a crime. The book is based on a unique data set: detailed comparative information about eight diverse genocides committed throughout the world and throughout the twentieth century. Its approach is that of comparative criminology.

As an exploratory study, this one is not designed to promote a major new theory about genocide or to back one of the many theories already in play—although it does confirm some earlier theoretical positions and disconfirm others. Above all, the study’s value lies in its effort to apply a rigorous, systematic methodology—comparative criminology—to genocide in order to determine what the phenomenon “looks like.” While historians have produced invaluable studies of single genocides, little agreement has as yet been reached about how social science might be used to compare events of this type. Until recently, most “comparative” studies of genocide were edited collections of chapters on individual genocides with introductions that generalize across the examples but do so intuitively and unsystematically.6 This is changing today with the publication of truly comparative studies that do much to illuminate the nature of genocide.7 Moreover, quantitative research on genocide is surging ahead.8 Although the present study is only minimally quantitative, its systematic character helps establish more reliable conclusions about the nature of genocide than edited “comparative” collections were able to reach.

It seems strange that few people have tried to apply criminology to genocide, given that genocide is first and foremost a crime and that criminology, broadly defined to include methods and explanations from sociology, psychology, history, and other fields, offers rich possibilities for improving our grasp of genocide.9 I try to see how far criminology can carry us toward better comprehension of this type of atrocity. The prospects might seem dim, given that many criminologists focus on street crime and that criminology is largely a product of the Global North, whereas most genocides, until recently, were thought to have occurred elsewhere. Nonetheless, I want to see how well criminological methods and theories apply elsewhere, including to the Global South and the world’s most serious crime. Moreover, a new generation of scholars is insisting that colonial genocides occurred in both the United States and Canada, atrocities against indigenous peoples that can no longer be dismissed just because they do not conform to the Holocaust template or easily fit with the UN’s definition of genocide.10 These scholars are leading the way toward a powerful new understanding of the crime of genocide.

It may also seem strange that I, in particular, think criminology is up to these tasks or can be trusted to accomplish them without causing serious harm. In “Criminology’s Darkest Hour,” I wrote about criminology’s role in the Nazi genocides, during which explanations of crime were adapted to eugenic ends and used to justify the extermination of not only criminals but also Jews, “Gypsies,” homosexuals, and other “asocials.”11 In Creating Born Criminals, I wrote about eugenic criminology, a movement (ca. 1870–1940) in the United States and elsewhere that criminalized people with mental disabilities and established eugenic prisons in which so-called feeble-minded criminals could be held for life.12 One outcome was the US Supreme Court’s infamous Buck v. Bell decision, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., allowed forced sterilization of people deemed feeble-minded; otherwise, Holmes reasoned, their “degenerate offspring” would end up as killers.13

However, the eugenics movement has passed, and I have grown less doubtful of criminology’s potential. Over decades of thinking about criminology, I have found it a flexible tool for addressing all sorts of social problems. And genocide is a crime, albeit one that until recently most criminologists ignored. Moreover, criminology has always been deeply engaged with politics and social justice. I wrote this book because I think criminology can improve understandings of the very complex phenomenon of genocide.

A Changing Crime in a Changing World

There was a time, not so long ago, when genocide seemed to have remained fairly static over time as a type of event. The model was set by a biblical story in the book of Numbers, in which Moses sends the Israelites to war against the Midianites. When the Israelites had slain all the males and captured their women, children, and flocks, they returned to Moses, expecting praise for their efforts. But to their surprise, he was furious: “Have ye saved all the women alive? . . . Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”14 In this telling (we might call it the biblical model), genocide begins with a leader who orders his soldiers to destroy all males in the targeted group while permitting them to pillage and keep surviving women (at least the virgins) and female children for themselves as slaves or other chattel.

For some people, the biblical model remains a dominant image of genocide, and in some respects, that image is correct. One consistent characteristic is that genocides rarely, if ever, result in total destruction of the victim population—even all of its men. Of the Poles in the Russian prison camps, about 395 survived the Katyn Forest Massacre, approximately 100 of whom were probably informants.15 One who was spared was the nephew of a Soviet film director. Another, who was wanted for interrogation by the NKVD, was led to the forest but pulled back; he ended up teaching economics in Canada.16 There are always some survivors who live to tell their tale. In twentieth-century genocides, as in the war on the Midianites, moreover, wholesale theft of property is common and may even be a central aim of the slaughter. And in more recent genocides, the victors often continue to evince great interest in the captured women’s sexuality, although they are more likely to rape than to kidnap and assimilate the virgins.

In the academic world, static models of genocide were abandoned as Holocaust scholars adopted the idea of genocide as a process. There followed stage models and, with them, sensitivity to internal dynamics in genocidal events.17 But scholars produced few broad overviews that might give a sense of changes over time in genocide itself—not in individual genocidal events but in the phenomenon per se—until the criminologist Susanne Karstedt began writing about the evolution of genocide.18 Even then, the changes remained difficult to detect because genocides differ so much among themselves.

In what follows, I identify and try to explain some of these changes. Next I identify changes in responses to genocide over time, and I conclude this section by noting how the study of genocide has changed in recent years.

Genocide Is Changing

The crime itself is evolving. From the arrival of the Spanish in the New World and well into the twentieth century, genocides often were precipitated by colonialism, with its hunger for land, physical resources, and the labor of the indigenous population.19 Later (and into the present) genocide was often linked to decolonization and efforts by postcolonial states to establish themselves as homogeneous nations. During the first half of the twentieth century, the crime tended to be committed by nation-states against other states. Both colonialist and interstate genocides drew on imperialism, nationalism, and grand ideologies of race and ethnicity to justify their atrocities. These justifications were still used to rationalize genocides at the end of the twentieth century, but they had lost their former power. Today, as Karstedt writes, contemporary genocides and other mass atrocities “typically occur beneath the level of the nation-state and independently of its boundaries. They evolve in the environment, social formation and the complex actor configurations of ‘extremely violent societies.’ . . . Diverse groups of perpetrators participate for a multitude of reasons, ranging from state government forces to militias. . . . Perpetrators are located beyond borders, and recruited across borders.”20 One of the most prominent changes, then, is the fluidity and localization of recent genocides. That genocides now tend to be committed within a country, often as part of a civil war, helps explain why the pace of genocide picked up in the second half of the twentieth century. Genocide was simply not as big or costly an enterprise as it often had been in the past.

The location of genocides and their frequency by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1. Genocide, Criminology, and Evolution of the “Crime of Crimes”
• 2. What Kind of a Crime Is Genocide?
• 3. The Big Picture: The Macro Dynamics of Genocide
• 4. The Emotional Dynamics of Genocide: Meso-Level Analyses
• 5. Extermination Up Close and Personal: Genocide on the Micro Level
• 6. Mobilization for Destruction
• 7. Gender and Genocide
• 8. How Do Genocides End? Do They End?
• 9. Treating Genocide as a Crime
• Appendix A: Twentieth-Century Genocides
• Appendix B: Case-Study Questions
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author