Part 1 Overview
Chapter 1
The Origins of Genocide
This chapter analyzes the origins of genocide as a global-historical phenomenon, providing a sense of genocideâs frequency through history. It then examines the origin and evolution of the concept, unravels some central theoretical debates, and explores âcontested casesâ that test the boundaries of the genocide framework. No other chapter in the book tries to cover so much ground, and the discussion may at points seem complicated and confusing, so please fasten your seatbelts.*
Genocide in prehistory, antiquity, and early modernity
âThe word is new, the concept is ancient,â wrote sociologist Leo Kuper in his seminal 1981 text of genocide studies.1 He echoed the father of genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin, whose unfinished history of genocideâonly recently publishedâdeclared at its outset: âGenocide is a new word, but the evil it describes is old.â2 The roots of genocide are lost in distant millennia, and will remain so unless an âarchaeology of genocideâ can be developed.3 The difficulty, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn pointed out in their study The History and Sociology of Genocide, is that such historical records as exist are ambiguous and undependable. While history today is generally written with some fealty to âobjectiveâ facts, many past accounts aimed to praise the writerâs patron (normally a powerful leader) and to emphasize the superiority of oneâs own religious beliefs. They may also have been intended as good storiesâso that when Homer quotes King Agamemnonâs quintessential pronouncement of root-and-branch genocide, one cannot know what basis it might have in fact:
We are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mothersâ wombsânot even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear.4
The founder of genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin, quoted the declaration of the Assyrian King Ashur-natsir-pal, boasting about one of his military triumphs:
I crossed the mountain of Kashiari and toward Kinabu, the fortress of Hulai I advanced. With the multitude of my troops by a charge, tempestuous as the tempest, I fell upon the town. I took it. I put to the sword 600 of their warriors. I delivered 3,000 prisoners over to the flames and I left not a single one of them alive to serve as a hostageâŠ. Their carcasses I piled in heaps, their young men and their maidens I delivered to the flames. Hulai, their governor, I flayed; I stretched his skin along the wall of Dadaamusa. The city I destroyed, I ravaged it, I gave it to the flames.5
What are we to make of Agamemnonâs command and Ashur-natsir-palâs proclamation? Are they factually reliable? Regardless, they encapsulate a fantasy and often an ambition of kings and commoners alike: know thine enemies, and annihilate them.
Box 1.1 Neanderthals: The first victims of genocide?
The Neanderthals, humanityâs closest cousins, disappeared from their lands in Europe some 26,000 to 32,000 years ago. For many decades, a consensus prevailed that climate change had driven them to extinction. According to more recent research, however, it appears that not only were Neanderthal populations highly resistant to climatic fluctuations, but conditions were quite mild in southwestern Europe, during the period when the Neanderthals âmade their last standâ as a species. According to The Washington Postâs Rick Weiss, reviewing a 2007 study by Chronis Tzedakis and his colleagues: âThat pretty much leaves one suspect: the butlerâor more precisely the predecessors to all butlers and to modern humans, generally, who were making their initial sweep across Europe at the time.â As Konrad Hughen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution noted: âThey [Neanderthals] survived 20,000 years of very unstable climate. Then when you add humans to the mix, they are gone within 10,000 years. You tell me what the most parsimonious explanation is.â6
In 2013, Spanish anthropologists went further, speculating that âour closest extinct relative was exterminated in the same way as 178 other large mammals, so called megafauna, which are suspected of going at least partially by the hand of hungry human hunters.â That is, the Neanderthals may have been hunted to extinction as food, as well as competitors for land and nutritional resources, as other megafauna were.7 Or perhaps it was dogs that did most of the eating. Pat Shipman argued in her book The Invaders that human beings first partnered with canines to bring about the Neanderthalsâ extermination.8
Figure 1.1 Growing evidence points to a human-driven extermination of Europeâs Neanderthal population, rather than a slow decline linked to climate change.
Regardless of the Neanderthalsâ fate, archaeological discoveries announced in early 2016 emphasized how deeply-rooted in the human species was the institution of savage intercommunal massacre. For the first time, persuasive evidence was found of such massacresâwhich bear the hallmarks of âroot-and-branchâ genocideâoccurring some 10,000 years ago, prior to the rise of agriculture and durable human settlements. James Gorman of The New York Times reported findings in the journal Nature that of â12 relatively complete skeletonsâ found by Lake Turkana in Kenya, â10 showed unmistakable signs of violent death ⊠Partial remains of at least 15 other people were found at the site and are thought to have died in the same attack.â The remains of these early hunter-gatherers, Gorman reported, âtell a tale of ferocity. One man was hit twice in the head by arrows or small spears and in the knee by a club. A woman, pregnant with a 6- to 9-month-old fetus, was killed by a blow to the head, the fetal skeleton preserved in her abdomen. The position of her hands and feet suggest that she may have been tied up before she was killed.â
Pottery at the site suggested that the targeted population may have harbored food resources that drew the notice of forager-predators. âOr the attackers may have been after captives,â Gorman wrote. âBones from one young teenager were found at the site, and remains of adults and children under 6, but no remains of older children, who might have been taken by the attackers.â9
Humanity has always nurtured conceptions of social difference that generate a sense of in-group versus out-group, as well as hierarchies of good and evil, superior and inferior, desirable and undesirable. As Chalk and Jonassohn observed:
Historically and anthropologically peoples have always had a name for themselves. In a great many cases, that name meant âthe peopleâ to set the owners of that name off against all other people who were considered of lesser quality in some way. If the differences between the people and some other society were particularly large in terms of religion, language, manners, customs, and so on, then such others were seen as less than fully human: pagans, savages, or even animals.10
The fewer the shared values and standards, the more likely members of the out-group were (and are) to find themselves beyond the âuniverse of obligation,â in sociologist Helen Feinâs evocative phrase. Hence the advent of âreligious traditions of contempt and collective defamation, stereotypes, and derogatory metaphor indicating the victim is inferior, sub-human (animals, insects, germs, viruses) or super-human (Satanic, omnipotent).â If certain classes of people are âpre-defined as alien ⊠subhuman or dehumanized, or the enemy,â it follows that they must âbe eliminated in order that we may live (Them or Us).â11
An example of this mindset is the text that underpins the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultural traditions: the Old Testament (particularly its first five books, the Pentateuch). In general, these texts depict God as âa despotic and capricious sadist,â12 and his followers as eager gĂ©nocidaires (genocidal killers). The trend begins in the Book of Genesis (6:17â19), where God decides âto destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven,â with the exception of Noah and a nucleus of human and animal life.13 In âthe most unequivocally extirpatory of [the] Old Testament texts,â14 1 Samuel 15: 2â3, âthe Lord of hostsâ declares: âI will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.â15
The Midianites in Numbers 31: 7â18 fare little better, but even the minimal selectivity at the outset vexes Moses:
They warred against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and slew every maleâŠ. And the people of Israel took captive the women of Midian and their little ones; and they took as booty all their cattle, their flocks, and all their goods. All their cities ⊠they burned with fireâŠ. And Moses was angry with the officers of the armyâŠ. [He] said to them, âHave you let all the women live? Behold, these caused the people of Israel, by the counsel of Balaam, to act treacherously against the Lord ⊠and so the plague came to the congregations of the Lord. Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him [sexually]. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.16
As this passage suggests, genocides in prehistory and antiquity were often designed not just to eradicate enemy ethnicities, but to incorporate and exploit some of their members. Generally, it was children (particularly girls) and women (particularly virgins, or those in the associated age group) who were spared murder. They were simultaneously seen as the group least able to offer resistance, and as sources of offspring for the dominant group, descent in patrilineal society being traced through the male bloodline.17 By contrast, âevery maleâ was often killed, âeven the little ones.â We see here the roots of gendercide against men and boys, including male infants, discussed further in Chapter 13.
A combination of gender-selective mass killing and root-and-branch genocide pervades accounts of ancient wars. Chalk and Jonassohn provide a wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empireâs root-and-branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium BCE,* and the destruction of Melos by Athens during the Peloponnesian War (fifth century BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides in his âMelian Dialogue.â18
The Roman siege and eventual razing of Carthage at the close of the Third Punic War (149â46 BCE) has been labeled âThe First Genocideâ by historian Ben Kiernan.19 The âfirstâ designation is debatable; the label of genocide seems apt. Fueled by the documented ideological zealotry of the senator Cato, Rome sought to suppress the supposed threat posed by (disarmed, mercantile) Carthage. âOf a population of 2â400,000, at least 150,000 Carthaginians perished...