The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective by Robert Gellately & Ben Kiernan

Author:Robert Gellately & Ben Kiernan [Gellately, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Tags: Social Science, Genocide & War Crimes, 20th Century, Modern, Demography, General, Political Science, World, International, Law, History
ISBN: 9780521527507
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2003-07-07T22:49:16.057250+00:00

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Jay Winter

cultural forms, inparticular, the form of the commedia dell’arte. Gance used the “high-tech” medium of the day – the cinema – to convey ancient messages about love, sacrifice, redemption. Here we can see the tendency in the cultural history of the war for a revitalizationof the old ina conflict of astonishing novelty. Far from initiating a cultural revolution, the Great War was a counterrevolutionary moment in cultural history, the time when the old flared up to make sense of a kind of war the world had never seen before.29

The Cultivation of Hatred

In the effort of cultural mobilization, total war entailed the demonization of the enemy. Some of this story is old – witness the wars of religion or the propaganda of the Reformation and Counter Reformation – but aligned with the other elements of this matrix, the cultural history of warfare entered a new and strikingly original landscape. It is a space in which what Peter Gay has called the cultivationof hatred took place, aneffort that provided the context in which war crimes of a revolutionary scale and character took place.30 I refer to genocide as a feature of total war.

It is important to note the contingent nature of this argument. Not all nations engaged in total war committed genocide, but total war created the conditions that made it possible. It entailed the brutalization of millions and thereby raised radically the tolerance of violence in some societies caught up inarmed conflict.

Total war is like an infection; it has the capacity to infect many populations, but most – through their legal systems, education, religious beliefs, military traditions, or other convictions and practices – are inoculated against it.31 Those not so fortunate, those (so to speak) without the antibodies, suc-cumb to the infection, and then the innocent suffer. Under these conditions, and in the context of total war, genocide can occur. It did during the First World War.

This framework is essential to an understanding of the unfolding of the Armenian genocide of 1915. Despite decades of Turkish denials, the outline of this set of staggering war crimes is relatively well known. Its revolutionary character is not.32 Inthe hours before dawnonApril 24, 1915, Allied 29 For a fuller exposition of this argument, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Place of the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995).

30 P. Gay, The Cultivation of Hatred (New York, 1993).

31 I owe this image to George Mosse. For a comparison that emphasizes choice and contingency, see Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust (London, 1990).

32 On the Armenian genocide, see Johannes Lepsius, Rapport secret sur les massacres d’Arménie (1915–

1916) (Paris, 1987); Tribunal permanent des peuples, Le crime de silence. Le génocide des Arméniens

Armenian Genocide

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troops landed at Gallipoli, in an audacious and doomed attempt to knock Turkey out of the war. The very same night, the Turkish authorities began a process of repression of internal enemies – the Armenian communities, numbering perhaps 2 million people, concentrated in Anatolia

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