>> H-NET BOOK REVIEW
>> Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (October, 2009)
>>
>> Ben Kiernan. _Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and
>> Extermination from Sparta to Darfur_  New Haven: Yale University
>> Press, 2007.  x + 724 pp.  $26.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-300-14425-3;
>> $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-10098-3.
>>
>> Reviewed for H-German by John M. Cox, Florida Gulf Coast University
>>
>> A Major, Provocative Contribution to Genocide Studies
>>
>> With this monumental book, Ben F. Kiernan has made an immense
>> contribution to the field of genocide studies--and to fields ranging
>> beyond it. The result of extensive research and deep reflection, it
>> challenges scholars of genocide with its bold theses; delivers a
>> laudably inclusive inventory of genocidal violence spanning many
>> centuries; and represents a powerful example of a well-synthesized
>> world history, one that will be highly valuable for scholarly as well
>> as non-academic audiences.
>>
>> Rather than simply subjecting his readers to an oppressive account of
>> human slaughter--although inevitably the book does this as
>> well--_Blood and Soil_ offers an original analysis, uniting these
>> dreadful episodes from antiquity to the present. Kiernan argues
>> that a
>> convergence of four factors underpins the causes of genocide through
>> the ages: racism, which "becomes genocidal when perpetrators
>> imagine a
>> world without certain kinds of people in it" (p. 23); cults of
>> antiquity, usually connected to an urgent need to arrest a "perceived
>> decline" accompanying a "preoccupation with restoring purity and
>> order" (p. 27); cults of cultivation or agriculture, which among
>> other
>> things legitimize conquest, as the aggressors "claim a unique
>> capacity
>> to put conquered lands into productive use" (p. 29); and
>> expansionism.
>> Kiernan has developed and enriched this theory over the course of
>> several books and articles. In the influential _The Specter of
>> Genocide_ (2003), co-edited with Robert Gellately, Kiernan concluded
>> his own essay by arguing in a more tentative fashion for the
>> combustible potential of these elements: "As in the Armenian
>> Genocide,
>> the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, the tragedy of East
>> Timor
>> demonstrates the virulent, violent mix of racism, religious
>> prejudice,
>> expansionism, and idealization of cultivation. Each of these factors
>> is, of course, often a relatively harmless component of nationalist
>> ideology. Taken singly, none is a sufficient condition even for mass
>> murder. But their deadly combination is a persistent feature of
>> twentieth-century genocide."[1]
>>
>> In _Blood and Soil,_ Kiernan places obsessions with antiquity and
>> agriculture more prominently and weaves these four components
>> together
>> in varying ways. Sometimes, genocidal violence was "reinforced by
>> cults of antiquity and agriculture"; in several cases from early
>> modern Southeast Asia, expansionism in combination with cults of
>> antiquity and agriculture provided "an intellectual backdrop
>> to mass killing"; in other examples, "settler preoccupations with
>> antiquity and agriculture" contributed to genocidal outbursts (p.
>> 168). It is not always readily apparent how or why these factors--in
>> particular, obsessions with agriculture and antiquity--produce
>> genocidal violence, but the author is modest enough to acknowledge
>> that those factors "often accompanied genocide but cannot fully
>> explain it" (p. 168).
>>
>> Occasionally, the analytic reader may question these categories. For
>> instance, confidence in the book's chief thesis may be undermined by
>> the caveat, made in the introduction, that "catastrophes lacking more
>> than one of the major features of genocide ... identified" were
>> "excluded" from this study (p. 38). And Kiernan sometimes stretches
>> to
>> incorporate the agrarian and antiquity themes, as when seizing upon
>> the utterances of "metaphors of cultivation" or "agrarian metaphors"
>> by individuals in the service of violent regimes. In a 2001 article
>> on
>> the Cambodian genocide, Kiernan pointed to another genocidal
>> dynamic--the "twin peaks" of "national ambition and national
>> insecurity"--that could have been a stronger impetus in some of the
>> episodes chronicled in _Blood and Soil_ than the convergence of the
>> four factors the book stresses.[2] Kiernan occasionally invokes but
>> does not develop this theme of ambition alongside insecurity in
>> _Blood
>> and Soil_. (In relation to Bosnia, for example, Kiernan quotes Norman
>> Cigar in arguing that Serb nationalists' "dualistic self-view of
>> superiority and accompanying vulnerability bordering on paranoia"
>> fueled the genocide [p. 588]).
>>
>> Nonetheless, _Blood and Soil_'s patient accumulation of detail and
>> evidence should win over readers who may initially be skeptical of
>> its
>> principal arguments. While Kiernan's thesis is probably more easily
>> adaptable to ancient, medieval, and early modern genocides than to
>> those of more recent times, _Blood and Soil_ amply demonstrates the
>> murderous potential of this combination of ideological forces in
>> atrocities as recent as those in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia.
>> The
>> author also skillfully applies his theory to certain heavily
>> researched topics, such as Nazism's ideological origins and
>> precursors. "Land and race were linked," Kiernan avers, in the
>> ideology and movements of the late nineteenth century that saw the
>> German peasantry as the "true embodiment of the _Volk_" and that
>> fused
>> romantic agrarianism with other strains of conservative and
>> nationalist thought (p. 378).
>>
>> In addition to its bold effort at unifying disparate historical
>> events, Kiernan's book is distinctive in other fundamental ways. In
>> contrast to other major overviews of genocide, two-thirds of _Blood
>> and Soil _is devoted to mass killings that predate 1900. More than
>> two
>> hundred pages--all of part 2 of the three-part book--are devoted to
>> "Settler Colonialism," chronicling atrocities that accompanied
>> land-grabs and ethnic cleansing in Ireland, colonial North America,
>> Australia, the United States, and nineteenth-century Africa. The
>> section on Africa begins with the French efforts to conquer, pacify,
>> and settle Algeria between 1830 and 1875, one of several oft-
>> neglected
>> episodes that Kiernan masterfully integrates. This second section is
>> in some ways _Blood and Soil_'s strongest, a powerful complement to
>> the recent work of A. Dirk Moses, among others, that links not simply
>> colonialism, but also settler colonialism and imperialist occupation,
>> to racism and genocidal violence. And, as Kiernan reminds us, some of
>> the victims of the Europeans' colonial depredations acted with
>> relative magnanimity: Herero chief Samuel Maharero's order "to spare
>> women, children, other Africans, and non-German whites" certainly
>> stands in sharp contrast to General Lothar von Trotha's infamous
>> "extermination order," as well as the bellowing of German newspapers
>> that "no war may be conducted humanely against nonhumans" (p. 382).
>>
>> In its chapter on the Holocaust, _Blood and Soil _emphasizes the
>> obsessions of Heinrich Himmler and Richard Walther Darré with the
>> peasantry and its supposed values. In contrast, according to the Nazi
>> vision, the Jew was (here Kiernan quotes Jeffrey Richards)
>> "materialist and thus the enemy of Volkist  spiritualism ... a
>> rootless wanderer and therefore the opposite of Volkist rootedness,"
>> and in other ways a creature of the city and thereby "alien to the
>> agrarian peasant ideal of the Volk" (p. 431). In fascinating,
>> disturbing detail Kiernan also outlines the scale, grandiosity, and
>> otherworldliness of the Nazis' ethnic engineering and population
>> schemes. As elsewhere in this book, Kiernan provides an appropriate
>> balance of analysis and description. While he does not overwhelm the
>> reader with grisly details, his examples are exceptionally well
>> chosen
>> (such as an eyewitness account from Majdanek). Without overstating
>> his
>> case or wading too far into the contentious "uniqueness" debate,
>> Kiernan concludes this chapter with a concise summation of the
>> Holocaust's distinctive features: "A state-sponsored attempt at total
>> extermination by industrialized murder of unarmed millions [that] has
>> no parallel before or since" (p. 454).[3]
>>
>> It is no longer easy to be surprised by the capacity of humans to
>> commit cruel, depraved crimes against one another. As Yehuda Bauer
>> wrote, "The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from
>> human
>> norms; the horror is that it didn't."[4] Nonetheless, numerous
>> startling revelations leap from the grim pages of _Blood and Soil_.
>> For example, perhaps alone among genocidal perpetrators, the Khmer
>> Rouge prolonged its murderous activities long beyond the end of its
>> reign, sporadically massacring Vietnamese who were unfortunate enough
>> to fall into its hands as late as the 1990s (p. 554). Kiernan also
>> introduces or re-introduces readers to certain grisly figures who
>> deserve a more prominent place in history's gallery of depraved
>> killers: the sixteenth-century Japanese feudal lord Toyotomi
>> Hideyoshi, for instance, whose efforts at expansion and unification
>> entailed the murder of tens of thousands of Koreans, and, more
>> obscurely, the following century's pitiless Javanese ruler Amangjurat
>> I, whose victims included numerous close family members and
>> associates.
>>
>> A trailblazing work such as this one should not only posit original
>> ideas but also elicit questions. Among the issues that _Blood and
>> Soil_ prompts further reflection upon: How small can a targeted group
>> be for us to classify its extinction or near-extinction as a
>> genocide?[5] The destruction of the Pequots, who declined from about
>> four thousand in 1647 to approximately five hundred a few years
>> later,
>> meets most standard criteria for genocide, and resulted from a
>> calculated policy of the English authorities. Kiernan also offers an
>> incisive account of the genocide of the Tasmanian people, whose
>> numbers were nearly identical to those of the Pequots two centuries
>> earlier. Modern-day students of genocide can be inured, in a sense,
>> by
>> the massive scale of the Holocaust. But Kiernan implicitly suggests
>> that, although the Pequots' and Tasmanians' numbers were relatively
>> small, their cruel fates should indeed be included in a litany of
>> genocidal crimes.
>>
>> A slow-motion genocide, such as that of North America's indigenous
>> peoples, also presents a challenge to scholars. Kiernan reports that
>> the native population "north of the Rio Grande" declined from roughly
>> 7,000,000 to 600,000 in the three centuries following the arrival of
>> the Europeans in 1492 (p. 219). Little question would remain that
>> such
>> a catastrophic decline, had it occurred over the course of only a few
>> years, would qualify it as "genocide." The great expanse of time
>> involved, the multiple shifts in policy of the English and later
>> American authorities, and the diversity of experience of the many
>> dozens of Native American nations have contributed to the controversy
>> over how to characterize the tragedy of North America's indigenous
>> peoples. For his part, Kiernan--who is admirably flexible and
>> undogmatic in his use of the terms "genocide," "genocidal acts," and
>> "genocidal violence"--has no qualms about including this long,
>> complex
>> story in two of the book's finest and best-researched chapters.
>>
>> Another question for genocide scholars to consider: Should we regard
>> the issue of intent with greater wariness and circumspection?[6] At
>> times, the perpetrators made it easy to assign genocidal intent:
>> "Kill
>> Koreans one by one, and empty the country," commanded Hideyoshi in
>> 1597 (p. 129). But it is often not so simple to determine intent, and
>> perhaps when mass suffering and death results from criminal
>> indifference, or could have been easily predicted by a conquering or
>> occupying power, that power is no less guilty of genocide, if other
>> elements of the standard definitions are met. This problem is
>> discussed early in the book and appears elsewhere; as Kiernan notes,
>> the International Law Commission (established by the UN in 1948 at
>> the
>> time of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
>> of Genocide) holds that "a general awareness of the _probable_
>> consequences" of destructive acts "is not sufficient" (p. 17). This
>> may be one of the elements of the classic definitions of
>> "genocide"--along with the exclusion of political groups in the 1948
>> definition--that is overly legalistic and in need of revision.[7]
>>
>> One additional area of further investigation that is suggested by
>> _Blood and Soil_: the similarity of the cults of violence of certain
>> presumably "left-wing" regimes (such as the Khmer Rouge) to fascist
>> cults of violence. The lyrics of Khmer Rouge anthems that Kiernan
>> quotes are highly reminiscent of the quasi-religious glorification of
>> violence and martyrdom of the Iron Guard, the Arrow Cross, and other
>> European fascist movements of the interwar and World War II era.
>> These
>> lines from the Khmer Rouge's "The Red Flag" may suffice to
>> demonstrate
>> that point for readers less familiar with the Cambodian example:
>> "Glittering red blood blankets the earth--blood given up to liberate
>> the people"; the even less elegant "Rainfall in Pisakh" includes the
>> lines, "our anger shoots out at the imperialists ... and their
>> reactionary lackeys, killing them until they disappear" (p. 548).
>>
>> While the chapter Kiernan devotes to China has a somewhat rushed
>> quality, it skillfully incorporates Maoist China into the
>> continuities
>> traced in this book. "Even if half the population of the world were
>> wiped out this would not be a total disaster," opined the Great
>> Helmsman (pp. 530-531). Such utterances were not uncommon from Mao,
>> who offered to sacrifice unbelievable numbers of his own population
>> to
>> support world revolution. It would be illuminating to explore the
>> ways
>> in which Mao and others developed, nurtured, and then inculcated such
>> a nihilistic disregard for human life. As to whether the label of
>> "genocide" should be applied to the horrors of Maoist China, perhaps
>> it is more useful to sidestep the genocide issue with Mao, and simply
>> designate his rule as "the worst non-genocidal regime," in Jean-Louis
>> Margolin's astute and precise phrase--which is sufficient to place it
>> where it belongs in history.[8] At any rate, Kiernan's specialization
>> in Asian studies is evident not only in his examinations of
>> twentieth-century Cambodia, China, and Japan, but also in his
>> chapters
>> on late medieval and early modern East Asia--episodes that are rarely
>> if ever discussed in other large-scale overviews of genocide. Yet
>> geographically the book is well balanced, and few Europeanists
>> venture
>> as far outside their "comfort zones" as Kiernan does here.
>>
>> Ultimately, any of the book's weaknesses result from its admirable
>> ambition and breadth, and are heavily outweighed by its substantial
>> contributions and strengths. _Blood and Soil _is unsurpassed among
>> works of this nature in examining and uncovering the ideological and
>> philosophical, as well as cultural and political, underpinnings of
>> genocide. However reticent some scholars may be to accept the book's
>> thesis concerning the role of cults of antiquity and agriculture, we
>> owe Kiernan a large debt for proposing this bold, richly suggestive
>> theory, which is already exerting a strong influence within the
>> ever-expanding field of genocide studies.
>>
>> Notes
>> [1]. Ben Kiernan, "Twentieth-Century Genocides: Underlying
>> Ideological
>> Themes from Armenia to East Timor," in _The Specter of Genocide: Mass
>> Murder in Historical Perspective,_ ed. Robert Gellately and Ben
>> Kiernan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 51.
>>
>> [2]. Ben Kiernan, "Myth, Nationalism and Genocide," _Journal of
>> Genocide Research_ 3 (2001): 190.
>>
>> [3]. While this is entirely consistent with current Holocaust
>> scholarship, it might be time to reconsider the emphasis we place on
>> the "industrialization" of the Holocaust as a distinguishing
>> characteristic. See Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, _The Holocaust:
>> Critical Historical Approaches_ (Manchester: Manchester University
>> Press), 68-70.
>>
>> [4]. Yehuda Bauer, _Rethinking the Holocaust_ (New Haven: Yale
>> University Press, 2002), 42.
>>
>> [5]. See Adam Jones, _Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction _(New
>> York: Routledge, 2006), for a brief but illuminating discussion of
>> this issue. As Jones points out, "We readily use 'war' to designate"
>> both small-scale wars, such as the so-called Soccer War of 1969
>> between Honduras and El Salvador, "as well as epochal descents into
>> barbarity" such as World War II. "There seems to be no reason why we
>> should not distinguish between larger and smaller, more or less
>> exterminatory genocides in the same way" (20).
>>
>> [6]. The issue of "intent" has come under greater scrutiny recently;
>> see, for example, Tony Barta, Norbert Finzsch, and David Stannard,
>> "Three Responses to 'Can There be Genocide Without the Intent to
>> Commit Genocide?" _Journal of Genocide Research_ 10 (March 2008):
>> 111-126, and Martin Shaw, _What is Genocide _(Cambridge: Polity,
>> 2007), 81-90.
>>
>> [7]. Adam Jones recently noted that "[t]he position of the Rwanda
>> tribunal (ICTR) that 'any stable and permanent group' is in fact to
>> be
>> accorded protection under the Convention, is likely to become the
>> norm
>> in future judgments." Jones, _Genocide: A Comprehensive
>> Introduction_,
>> 13.
>>
>> [8]. Jean-Louis Margolin, "Mao's China: The Worst Non-Genocidal
>> Regime?" in _The Historiography of Genocide,_ ed. Dan Stone (New
>> York:
>> Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 438-467.
>>
>> Citation: John M. Cox. Review of Kiernan, Ben, _Blood and Soil: A
>> World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur_.
>> H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2009. URL:
>> http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25301
>>
>> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
>> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
>> License.
>>
>> ----- End forwarded message -----
>>

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS