Philobiblon

Christian Gerlach’s Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century is, as you might expect, an extremely uncomfortable read. It’s also a rather monotonous one, because the author, who has a rather 20th-century focus on empericism and precise data collection, is determined to list in great detail, or where this is still far from clear to list completing narratives in great detail, about what happened in the mass slaughter in Indonesia in 1965-6, the destruction of the Armenians 1915-23, the mass violence and famine in Bangladesh (initially east Pakistan) in 1971-77, and the crisis in Greece during and after the Nazi operation. He also looks at anti-guerrilla activity in the late colonial and early post-colonial period (and it is interesting, and feels right, that he includes the activities – particularly when you look at the detail of the activities, that this all be grouped together).

I’ll admit to skipping over the detail in places, but nevertheless, I think this is an important book with a thesis worth further exploration – that the approach being taken to many recent incidences of mass violence – that of genocide, is inadequate, and the solutions that arise from that result ineffective. He says that approach encourages the identification of one “core motive”, it assumes that all actors are behaving monolithically for the same purpose, and that the “intent” can be identified. It also assumes that the state is an actor controlling or directing all others.

He says: “Societies are not intrinsically or inevitably violent, they turn extremely violent in what is a temporary process. … Indirect, structural violence is transformed into a variety of uses of direct, brute force: either by radicalization under pressure, by the diversion of pressures and aggression to prevent the outbreak of other conflicts, or by counter-violence by former victims (often allegedly to prevent other, more substantial violence.) A perception of social crisis also helps to explain why the use of violence is so often not just a matter of the state.” (p. 12)

In the colonial context, Gerlach looks at how people were drawn into the violence by governments. “The number of locals under arms of the government side was usually considerably larger than the number of guerrillas. In Portugese Africa, the former outnumbered the latter by three to one, in Algeria by six to one. What’s more, guerrilla violence usually targeted and killed many more local functionaries, including auxiliaries, than regular soldiers. The partisans suffered higher casualties. Many of them were inflicted by the auxiliaries, and the same goes for a great portion of the sacrifices by civilians (which generally exceeded all other losses combined). Militias carried divisions into every village. What resulted amounted to civil war. In such multi-polar conflicts, the fronts even cut through families.” (p. 194)

“Social differentiation … was intensified through the transformation of dislocated agriculturalists into a labor pool for industry or plantations…. Enforced concentrations in resettlement areas provided coffee estate workers in Northern and Central Angola, for construction workers and servants near the Cabora Bassa dam project in Mozambique, and for farm and industrial labourers for white businesses in Rhodesia. The shanty towns around the towns and cities in Greece provided hundreds and thousands of workers, further undermining wages in a country gripped by inflation economic crisis and generating labor migrants for Western Europe. Traditional economic patterns were dismantled; normal means of subsistence ceased to exist: grain production collapsed in Macedonia and Thrace in 1947 just as wheat, barley and cattle production did in Algeria from 1954-1960, herds in East Timor (especially the water buffalos needed for trampling the fields before sowing, and manioc and rice production plus the cattle trade in Monixco, Angola, in 1969…. Similar practices could be observed earlier: US forced resettlement of the Philippines around 1900 helped create a labor pool for the plantations of US corporations, and the depopulation of entire areas in North China and the resettlements of five million or so in ‘Manchukuo’ served to a large degree to provide cheap labor for the Japanese industrialisation of Manchura.” (pp. 210-11)

In light of current events, the relatively high profile of Greece in this story is enlightening, and disturbing. Britain’s more than 1,0000-strong military mission there in 1947 approved plans by the Greek Army for “clear-and-hold operations combined with large-scale population relocations… just like the Germans had done. Sometimes this affected literally the same persons, since British-approved forced evacuations took place in the same mountain areas of northern and northwestern Greece as under the Germans (at a time when Britain still gave some support to the leftist ELAS partisans.)… Such experiences were then taken further through the British Empire.” (pp225-6)

More on the problems with the genocide approach – that it has a “primordial interpretation of ethnicity .. instead of an understanding of race, ethnicity and nation as a dynamic process of definition as to what characterizes it and who is a member… reinforced by the UN Genocide Convention, where ‘genocide’ is reserved for the destruction of national, ethnic, racial and religious communities precisely because they were considered ‘stable and permanent groups’…. This enthnicization in a wider sense is specific to European and North American thinking…. Quite ironically, the objects of this view are often located outside the ‘West’ – Vinay Lal argues that particularly conflicts outside the so-called West are ‘ all too easily’ seen as primordial… in contrast, certain types of imperialist violence have been marginalized in genocide studies, which again suggests a close relationship between that field and nationalism: the Vietnam war seems to have been defined away from the realm of ‘genocide’ in a field dominated by North American scholars…. It has to be added that the ethnization of history has been strengthened by the ostensible triumph of Western European and North American capitalism and its values after the breakdown of European socialism around 1990. In the period since then, we have experienced something like a takeoff phase for genocide studies as a field in academia and in the public sphere, the rise of so-called humanitarian interventionism, as well as the birth of ‘ethnic’ cleansing as a conceptual category.” (pp. 260-61)

I don’t have enough of a theoretical background in these academic fields to have a clear opinion on these claims – which is why I’ve chosen largely to extract some interesting quotes from this book rather than make a broader analysis, but they certainly seem worth thinking about. And Gerlach’s understanding of how academic and legal constructs influence actual events on the ground, and how there’s interactions between events in apparently very different places, is powerful.