The Geometry of Genocide

A Study in Pure Sociology

Bradley Campbell

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813937410
• eBook ISBN: 9780813937427
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In The Geometry of Genocide, Bradley Campbell argues that genocide is best understood not as deviant behavior but as social control—a response to perceived deviant behavior on the part of victims. Using Donald Black's method of pure sociology, Campbell considers genocide in relation to three features of social life: diversity, inequality, and intimacy. According to this theory, genocidal conflicts begin with changes in diversity and inequality, such as when two previously separated ethnic groups come into contact, or when a subordinate ethnic group attempts to rise in status. Further, conflicts are more likely to result in genocide when they occur in a context of social distance and inequality and when aggressors and victims cannot be easily separated.

Campbell applies his approach to five cases: the killings of American Indians in 1850s California, Muslims in 2002 India and 1992 Bosnia, Tutsis in 1994 Rwanda, and Jews in 1940s Europe. These case studies, which focus in detail on particular incidents within each instance of genocide, demonstrate the theory's ability to explain an array of factors, including why genocide occurs and who participates. Campbell's theory uniquely connects the study of genocide to the larger study of conflict and social control. By situating genocide among these broader phenomena, The Geometry of Genocide provides a novel and compelling explanation of genocide, while furthering our understanding of why humans have conflicts and why they respond to conflict as they do.

1 GENOCIDE AS SOCIAL CONTROL

Genocide might appear incomprehensible. It seems unconnected to ordinary human experience, and we wonder how people could engage in such a shocking degree of violence toward their fellow human beings. Some scholars focus on “desk killers” who orchestrate evil from afar. Political theorist Hannah Arendt (1963), for example, famously spoke of the “banality of evil” in reference to Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, whose choices seemed driven by ordinary and careerist motives. Eichmann’s personality was that of a bureaucrat, and he facilitated the destruction of European Jews just as he would have any other organizational goal. But what about the thousands of people physically carrying out the killing? They were not little Eichmanns pushing papers; their actions were not banal.

According to some scholars, though, these killers were still detached in some way from the killing they participated in. To take one example, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1989) argues that industrialized killing, where people focus on specialized tasks, allows the perpetrators to psychologically distance themselves from what they are doing. This might be true, but it does not really tell us much about the Holocaust, much less about other genocides. It might be plausible as an explanation of the Holocaust if we think only of the gas chambers, but actually Jews were as likely to be shot as gassed (Snyder 2010:xiv). And consider what such shooting was like. In the summer of 1942 the men of Police Battalion 101, a unit of Germany’s Order Police, killed 1,500 Jews in Józefów, Poland. When they first began killing, the men sometimes aimed too high and caused their victims’ skulls to explode. One of the killers described the result: “As a consequence, brains and bones flew everywhere. Thus, we were instructed to place the bayonet point on the neck” (quoted in Browning 1998:64). But this did not completely solve the problem, as another man’s testimony illustrates: “Through the point-blank shot that was required, the bullet struck the head of the victim at such a trajectory that often the entire skull or at least the entire rear skullcap was torn off, and blood, bone splinters, and brains sprayed everywhere and besmirched the shooters” (quoted in Browning 1998:64). We do not see psychological distancing here. As Holocaust historian Christopher Browning points out, “Such a luxury … was not enjoyed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range” (1998:162).

Nor was the treatment of Jews elsewhere particularly antiseptic. At one labor camp in Poland, German guards beat the Jewish prisoners with “whips into which small iron balls had been wrought” (Goldhagen 2009:436). Sometimes they beat them on a “whipping table”; other times they had them run the gauntlet. They also locked them in bunkers, gave them electric shocks, and forced them to stand barefoot in the snow (Goldhagen 2009:437). And consider also the various “death marches” of the final days of the war, when a Nazi defeat was certain. Rather than abandon Jewish prisoners who remained alive, Germans led them on forced marches away from the allied troops. A U.S. Army officer describes a group of women who had survived one of the marches: “In addition to their clothes being dirty, worn out, ill fitting, tattered and torn they were covered for the most part with human stool which was spread for the most part all over the floor.… They were too weak to walk to evacuate their bowels” (quoted in Goldhagen 1996:331). During their march these women were so hungry they tried to eat grass and, at one point, a rotting pile of animal fodder. Yet their guards even prevented them from eating food offered to them by German civilians. They beat prisoners who tried to accept food, and one guard took the food and fed it to chickens (Goldhagen 1996:347–48).

If we look closely at the killing in other genocides, what we see is similar. In 1994 Rwanda we see Hutus kill their Tutsi victims with low-tech weapons such as machetes and clubs studded with nails. They chop off arms, legs, and breasts. They throw children down wells (Diamond 2005:316). They impale people like kebabs (Hatzfeld 2005a:81). They cut the Achilles tendons of those they cannot kill right away to keep them from running (Alvarez 2001:109; Taylor 2002:164). Japanese soldiers in 1937 Nanjing bury their Chinese victims up to their necks and then run over their heads with tanks. Others they nail to wooden boards or set on fire (Chang 1997:87). They rape young girls before slashing them in half with a sword. They rape a Chinese woman and then kill her by lighting a firecracker they have shoved into her vagina (Chang 1997:91, 94–95). In 1860s California four white men kill every member of a group of thirty Yahi Indians, including infants and small children. One of the killers switches from a rifle to a revolver during the massacre because, as he puts it, the rifle “tore them up so bad” (quoted in Kroeber 1961:85). In 1915 Turkey, Turkish gendarmes play the so-called game of swords, which involves tossing Armenian women from horses and impaling them on swords sticking up from the ground (Balakian 2003:315). In 2002 India we see mutilated and charred bodies in the aftermath of Hindu attacks on Muslims: “None of the bodies were covered. They were all burnt and shrunken. There were a few bodies of women where ‘lola dandas’ [iron rods] were shoved up their vagina” (quoted in Ghassem-Fachandi 2006:135).

In these glimpses of genocide, we do not see bureaucratic efficiency, people just following orders. Instead we see the killers behaving with a disregard for the victims, if not outright zeal in humiliating and hurting them. As we approach the subject of genocide, we would do well to keep in mind what genocide looks like up close.

GENOCIDE AS A SUBJECT MATTER

The most extreme and well-known genocide, the Holocaust, resulted in the deaths of nearly 6 million Jews, about two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Other victims of genocide include 1 million Armenians in Turkey in 1915 and 1916; 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994; 400,000 Africans in Sudan between 2002 and 2010; 200,000 Muslims in Bosnia in the early 1990s; 200,000 Gypsies in Nazi-controlled Europe between 1939 and 1945; 200,000 Chinese in Nanjing in 1937 and 1938; 100,000 Hutus in Burundi in 1972; 50,000 Kurds in Iraq in 1988, 20,000 Aborigines in Australia during the nineteenth century; 20,000 Hereros in South-West Africa (now Namibia) between 1904 and 1907; 10,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937; thousands of California Indians in the 1850s; and 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat, India in early 2002.

All of these are cases of genocide, or, as I define it here, one-sided, ethnically based mass killing. Since genocide is one-sided rather than reciprocal, warfare is not genocide.¹ Since it involves killing on the basis of ethnicity, killings on the basis of class or political identity are not genocides.² And since genocide is mass killing, the suppression of a language or religion, the forcible transfer of children, and the non-lethal deportation of ethnic groups are not genocide.³ This definition is narrower than some, broader than others.⁴ It captures what most people mean by genocide, though, and it is easy to apply to actual cases.⁵

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF GENOCIDE

It should be clear that genocide is a phenomenon of vast human significance. It is an extreme form of behavior seemingly defying understanding. The number of victims can be shocking, all the more so when we look to see what the killers actually do. Genocide is a social backdrop for all sorts of other dramatic behaviors too. It involves a break from ordinary social reality, and unusual behaviors flourish—not just cruelty, but extreme cowardice and selfishness on the one hand and courage and self-sacrifice on the other, as victims and bystanders decide what to do in the midst of genocide.

Some simply try to protect themselves. In Rwanda a Hutu man orders his pregnant Tutsi wife to leave their home. “I don’t want to die,” he says. “If you die, it is your problem” (quoted in Nowrojee 1996). Others face moral dilemmas as they decide whom to save and how much to cooperate with the killers. Hutu attackers tell another Rwandan Hutu married to a Tutsi that he can save his wife and children if he will turn over his wife’s parents and sister to be killed. He agrees (Gibbs et al. 1994). In Turkey some Armenians are told they will be spared if they convert to Islam. Most refuse and die along with their Christian neighbors (Miller and Miller 1993:71). In Eastern Europe Nazis seek the cooperation of Jewish leaders of the ghettos. Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, leader of the Lodz ghetto, cooperates fully, at one point even begging the ghetto residents to turn over children, the sick, and the elderly to the Nazis: “Fathers and mothers, give me your children! … Give me the sick. In their place, we can save the healthy” (quoted in Midlarsky 2005:289). In explaining his actions, he says, “If I can save a hundred Jews in the ghetto, everything will have been worthwhile” (quoted in Midlarsky 2005:290).

During genocides we see acts of collective resistance by the victims, even when the odds of success are hopeless. In 1850s California a band of Yuki Indians gathers in an obvious place, as if to invite attack by a white militia, and when the attack begins they “let fly a volley of arrows” (quoted in Miller 1979:72). But they are only able to wound some of the whites, while the whites kill or wound nearly all of the Indians. And in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 Poland, Jewish residents launch an armed rebellion despite having no chance of success (Einwohner 2003).

We see extreme acts of altruism, situations where people sacrifice and put their own lives at risk to rescue members of the targeted group. During the Holocaust, for example, Irene Gut, a young Polish woman working as the housekeeper for an elderly Nazi officer, saves twelve Jews by hiding them in the basement of the officer’s house. After the officer discovers two of the Jews, Irene agrees to begin a sexual relationship with him, which he insists on as the price for his silence (Opdyke and Armstrong 1999).

Genocide is significant for another reason as well: it may transform entire societies. This was clearly the case with the Holocaust. While losing the broader war, the Nazis mostly achieved their goal of eliminating European Jewry. Even those who survived—less than 10 percent of the Jewish population in places like Poland and Lithuania—often emigrated after the war, and Jewish communities that had been in Eastern Europe for centuries and had developed their own traditions and language are now simply gone. The Armenian genocide (along with an expulsion of Greeks later on) allowed Turkey to develop as a fairly homogenous state, with only the Kurds (who are Muslims, unlike the Armenians and Greeks) left as a significant minority. And genocide in the Americas and Australia allowed white settlers to establish new societies on the natives’ land. Even the Rwandan genocide drastically transformed the country, though the Hutu aggressors did not achieve their objective of preventing an invading Tutsi force from taking control. Most Tutsis now in Rwanda came there after the genocide, and according to political scientist Manus Midlarsky, “only with some effort can one find a Tutsi who was living in Rwanda in 1994” (2005:9).

Unsurprising given its significance, genocide is the focus of much cultural and scholarly activity. Major films deal with genocide, including recent films such as The Pianist (Polanski 2002), Hotel Rwanda (George 2004), and The Reader (Daldry 2008). So do novels such as The Farming of Bones (Danticat 1999), The Book Thief (Zusak 2007), and The Bastard of Istanbul (Shafak 2008). Philosophers and theologians also address the subject, often arguing that the Holocaust and other genocides raise issues about right and wrong, the nature of humanity, or the nature of God (see Abed 2006; Berkovits 1973; Davis 2005; Lee 2005; Moltmann 1974:277–78; Sontag 2005; Volf 2006:138–39; Wringe 2006). And many social scientists—political scientists, historians, psychologists, and sociologists—try to describe or explain some variable aspect of genocide. This book takes a scientific approach. It offers an explanation of genocide.

GENOCIDE AND MORALITY

A scientific approach to genocide differs from most others in that it does not deal with morality. This has not stopped social scientists from highlighting their condemnations of genocide, so prominent books on the topic have titles like Becoming Evil (Waller 2002), Extraordinary Evil (Coloroso 2007), Facing Evil (Woodruff and Wilmer 2001), and The Roots of Evil (Staub 1989).⁶ But whether genocide is right or wrong, moral or immoral, good or evil, is a matter to be addressed by filmmakers, novelists, theologians, and philosophers—not social scientists. A moral judgment about genocide is at best a distraction from the task of explanation.⁷ Worse, conceiving of genocide as a type of evil to be explained along with other evil acts may completely obscure what may be the most important fact about genocide: its perpetrators typically define their victims as evil.⁸ In sociological terms, genocide is not just a deviant behavior (something condemned as immoral); it is also social control (a reaction to deviant behavior). Recognize this and genocide immediately becomes less mysterious. Though you and I see the targets of genocide as innocent victims and find the violence against them incomprehensible, to the killers the targets are not victims at all; they are offenders, wicked people who deserve their punishment.

But we still need to answer two questions: Why do the killers have grievances against the targets, and why do they handle their grievances with genocide? As I demonstrate here, we can answer these questions by drawing from sociologist Donald Black’s theories of conflict and social control. The result is a new theory of genocide that explains not only why genocides occur, but also why some are more severe than others and why some people but not others participate in them. In these first two chapters, I discuss this theory and point to the many things about genocide it can explain. Then I examine genocide in five very specific locations. In these case studies we see the theory in action. We see that it can make sense of exactly what happens during genocides, such as who exactly kills whom. What distinguishes this theory from others—and what, I argue, makes it so successful—is its use of a novel theoretical strategy called pure sociology. Let us look briefly, then, at the main features of this strategy.

PURE SOCIOLOGY

The aim here is to understand genocide scientifically, and I have discussed why a scientific approach to genocide does not mix well with an ethical one. But those using a scientific approach might still explain genocide in a number of different ways. They might explain genocide with specific historical events (Melson 1992), broad cultural and historical trends (Bauman 1989; Freeman 1995a; Hinton 2002), the goals and opportunities of political elites (Valentino 2004), the characteristics of societies (Fein 1979; Goldhagen 1996, Kuper 1981), the characteristics of state regimes (Horowitz 2002; Rummel 1995), or the characteristics of individuals (Adorno et al. 1950; Kelman 1973). These various theories can be valuable, and I draw from many of them throughout the book. But all involve some kind of simplification. Every theory simplifies reality, leaving out some things while—if the theory is successful—revealing things we would not have seen otherwise.

Pure sociology is no different. Pure sociology gives us a way of homing in just on the social. In doing so it broadens the scope of the analysis in some ways—by including new kinds of sociological variables—and it narrows it in others—by excluding psychology, for example. The least we might expect from such an approach is that it would give us a new way of looking at genocide to complement the others. That alone would be valuable, but it does more than this. Pure sociology, we shall see, makes possible a powerful new theory of genocide. This theory cannot explain everything about genocide, and it is by no means the final word on the subject, but it can explain a great deal, and it can explain things that other theories cannot.

Pure sociology explains human behavior with its social geometry: its loc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Genocide as Social Control
• 2 Genocide as Predation
• 3 Indians and Whites in California
• 4 Muslims and Hindus in India
• 5 Muslims and Serbs in Bosnia
• 6 Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda
• 7 Jews and Gentiles in Europe
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index