Genocidal Violence ~Blood and Soil~

[Tina Greco - Melbourne]

Ben Kiernan | April 03, 2008

MY book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale, 2007; Melbourne University Press, 2008), is the subject of Mervyn Bendle's opinion piece, "Guilt merchants make us out to be worse than Hitler" (The Australian, March 27).

That question is not mine. But my answer is a resounding no, as Bendle surely read in the conclusion to chapter 11, on the Nazi Holocaust. I wrote: "History's most extreme case of genocide is clearly unique in several ways. A state-sponsored attempt at total extermination by industrialised murder of unarmed millions has no parallel before or since." My statement is unambiguous. Bendle's speculation is reckless.

I devoted 106 pages to the crimes of Nazi and communist regimes, yet Bendle maliciously asserts that Blood and Soil ignores anti-Semitism and totalitarianism, and "deliberately deflects attention away from Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and other murderous regimes", even exonerating them.

These wild and serious allegations completely misrepresent my book's documentation and denunciation of those genocides.

I have also written extensively on them in a half-dozen other works published during three decades, including The Pol Pot Regime and The Spectre of Genocide.

I make clear in the introduction to Blood and Soil that I define the term genocide according to the 1948 UN Genocide Convention and that my definition of extermination is the statutory international law definition of that separate crime against humanity. I also define and employ the non-legal term genocidal massacres. Yet Bendle falsely states: "Kiernan inflates the concept of genocide into an omnibus category."

Bendle compounds his analytical misrepresentations by his ludicrous sloppiness in marshalling evidence. He notes my "39 pages" on the Holocaust, excluding its 14 pages of illustrations and notes, while claiming in Quadrant that I devoted only 10 pages to it. There, he miscounts again, alleging that "the many horrendous 20th-century genocides are allocated only 178 pages in total".

In fact, my discussions of them fill 213 pages, equal in length to the section on colonial genocides on four continents through more than three centuries, from 1565 to 1900.

Blood and Soil is a world history of genocide and extermination from ancient times to the present. My introduction states: "Much of this book documents genocide by European perpetrators, but it also shows that they hold no monopoly on the crime ... Although more extensive written sources survive for Western history, adequate evidence from other regions shows that European conquest of most of the globe sprang from no inherently greater cultural propensity for violence. The roots of genocide lie elsewhere, if not everywhere. Moreover, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, violent domination also provoked internal dissent ... Demands for obedience and genocide recur in Judeo-Christian scripture, but so do models of dissent and non-violence. Many Christians took such lessons to heart." As examples I quoted English writer John Bulwer, and cited governors Arthur Phillip and Edmund Andros.

I added: "Some English colonists in both Australia and America tried to stop genocidal massacres of indigenous people ... or made genuine and effective efforts to conciliate or assist" them, while "British officials and settlers adopted varying approaches, as did diverse Aboriginal groups, who also ranged from conciliatory to aggressive". Twelve of my 16 chapters detail crimes of non-English-speaking perpetrators. Chapter four begins: "Christian, Muslim and Buddhist forces in turn all perpetrated genocidal massacres inSoutheast Asia between 1590 and 1800."

Yet Bendle wrongly asserts: "Kiernan makes the English-speaking people central to his litany of atrocity."

He even distorts my chapters on England's colonies from 1565 to 1776, and on 19th-century frontiers in Australia and the US, as unfair criticisms of "liberal democracies". Yet at that time those states denied women, indigenous people and many others the right to vote.

My disagreement with Bendle's concept of democracy is no indictment of "the English-speaking people".

Bendle's falsehoods fuel denial of past crimes, including what he calls "the alleged genocidal activities" against Aborigines. Readers may judge for themselves my chapter seven, Genocidal Violence in 19th-Century Australia.

Ben Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold professor of history and director of the genocide studies program at Yale University in the US.