Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur | 
| Author: Ben Kiernan
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
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Sales Rank: 58206
Media: Hardcover
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Pages: 768
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Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.1 x 2.2
ISBN: 0300100981
Dewey Decimal Number: 304.663
EAN: 9780300100983
ASIN: 0300100981
Publication Date: September 25, 2007
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Product Description
For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times—is among his most important achievements. Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.
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 Genocidists, says Aussie historian, tell big fibs May 3, 2008
This remarkable but harrowing encyclopedia of genocide could induce repetition strain, outraged denials, possibly even a sorrowful yearning to join a kinder species.
After Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide", postwar United Nations defined this as "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnical, or religious group". Ben Kiernan, a Yale-based Australian historian, takes his main title from an ideological tract of 1930s Germany. The first two parts review "imperial and colonial" slaughters up to the early 20th century while the third considers a "multiplicity" of subsequent genocides. Kiernan's summation of the Third Reich restates his four perceived correlates of state-linked killing: "The Nazi killing machine" was "operated by interlocking ideological levers that celebrated race, territory, cultivation, and history".
To make his case, the author is forever splicing unexpected and illuminating primary-source threads that come from years of practice. I was comfortable with his limited material on the recent past and substantial reluctance to forecast the near future. Yet I kept thinking of the elephant (I mean, the anthropoid) in the room - our evolution and biology.
The durable pre-Christian state of Sparta is typecast as "secretive, militaristic, expansionist" and as a source of myth for the short-lived Reich. Another potent idea surfacing early is that, by accident or design, artists and intellectuals supply lethal ammunition for politicians and generals. So you read Cato the Censor's famous interdiction against Carthage, but also Hesiod's and Virgil's poetry of the plough.
Early Christian and Jewish writers, argues Kiernan, shunned racialist thinking, with the term "race" only becoming prominent in medieval times. In the first of his case studies, he finds the Spaniards plumbing "intellectual depths" for God's consent to the Central American conquest. But he also reveals the to-and-fro of contemporary debate. Various citations from the early 1500s regret the Mexican and Guatemalan bloodbaths.
"War" commingles with "genocide" in the East Asian examples. National role-reversals and repetitions become familiar. Under a metaphorical alliance of "writing and chariots", the Buddhist kingdom of Dai Viet crushes its formerly competitive rival Champa, only to pay a heavy price later. Inspired by "ancient precedents", Japan of the 1500s assaults Korea, but "genocide abroad" is a harbinger for "violent cultural suppression at home". Japan reappears in the context of its 20th century Chinese and Pacific incursions.
The chronicle of England's 16th-century Irish depredations resonates. A cabal of Elizabethan "neo-cons" appears to agitate, not only for rivers of tears in Ireland, but also for the later miseries of indigenous America and Australia. Although Elizabeth herself is "parsimonious" in support, there follow martial law and massacre. In the peculiar logic of extermination, the Irish locals don't quite cut it as proper yeomen, but kill one and you could go for the lot.
Blood and Soil implies an 80-90 per cent decline from all causes in the indigenous North American (Australian) population over 1492-1800 (1788-1901). It suited English settlers in eastern America to discount the agricultural Native American settlements they displaced. But the "genteel, controlled, expanding rural idyll" of early 1700s Virginia could "explode in genocidal rage". George Washington's late 1700s war secretary writes that colonial settlement has been "even more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru". The Jeffersonian democracy, in Kiernan's view, required Native Americans to yield up "their lifestyle, their lands, or their lives - without the vote." Once the Cherokee nation is erased, the California indigenes are trampled in the dashes for "scientific racism" and precious gold.
Next come the wars and woes of Australian settlement. Up to Federation, the author estimates that "multiple deliberate killings" by squatters, mounted police and others accounted for 20,000 Aborigines. He concedes that frontier interactions were diverse and some settlers abhorred the violence. But with racial "science" casting Aboriginals as inferior nomads, "classical pastoralism" and government directives could drive an ideological program to convert indigenous lands.
Denialism continues in Australia and elsewhere. This, I note, includes an animus towards "Genocide Studies" and the broad UN definition of genocide. Call it or count it as you will, the evidence repeated here is part of Australian history. It is that colonial agencies condoned or sometimes conducted the "dispersals", which were aired in their assemblies, investigations, reports and journals.
The cynical collateral damage of the American and Australian land-rushes is distinguishable from the following Armenian and Holocaust slaughters. Typically, Kiernan first explains lebensraum, a geographer's neologism to accompany Germany's South West African occupation around the turn of the 20th century. From there, he picks at the rancid racial fears and florid territorial fantasies of Hitler, Himmler and supporting theoreticians.
Sustained by myths of Sparta, Rome, and ancient Germany, Hitler could claim his ancestors were "all peasants" and impose a Germans-only Hereditary Farm Law. It is often remarked that citizens not psychopaths were the Nazi functionaries. Kiernan doesn't go there much, apart from his neat opening point that genocidal enterprises require both "apocalyptic vision and prudent compromise". What he does illustrate is the even bigger territorial-ethnic engineering scheme the Reich had waiting in the wings.
Soviet Russia is portrayed both as Nazi victim, and Stalinist perpetrator of its own monumental program against the kulaks and the elite. But China is said to have exacted a famine toll far in excess of Stalin's. I'll leave the experts to determine whether state famine equals genocide.
Blood and Soil concludes by touring the post-1950 killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Indonesia, Pakistan (in Bangladesh), Guatemala (once again), Saddam's Iraq, Bosnia, and Sudan (Darfur). The Khmer Rouge rhetoric is compared and contrasted with that of Rwanda's Hutu Power.
At the outset, Kiernan guesses that the 21st century might be "bleak". He also nods to the surprising evidence that the genocide (or war or murder) toll is trending downwards relative to population. At the end, he remains convinced of his four great genocidal narratives. But surely his outstanding demonstration is that all through history the narrators of these themes are telling fibs. To what extent then are the themes correlates or causal factors in mass killing?
The book, as it happens, cites the biological metaphors of genocide rather than the underlying biology. I believe that more of an interweaving from evolution, culture and technology would sharpen the expositions emerging from genocide studies. The human lineage, after all, appears to have been evolving and deploying its uncommon adaptation of territorial inter-group violence since Paleolithic times. When Carthage finally fell in 146 BC, it was long after men in militias had first sacked settlements, but long before six billion humans had stormed the planet.
(Canberra Times, May 2008)
Something new February 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book, while it may be wrong on several things, nonetheless adds a great deal to our understanding of genocide. Many books on genocide look only to the 20th century and begin either with the German campaigns against the Herrero in Africa or with the Armenian genocide. This book goes deeper. it looks all the way back to ancient Sparta and then take shte reader through the destruction of native people in the New World. In places such as Hispanola the native popualtion declined from a million to a mere 10,000 in a few decades.
But the real gem of this book is that it examines the genocides that are rarely if every written about such as the Vietnamese conqest of Champa and the destruction of the Chams who wer Hindu while the Vietnamese were Buddhist. This is a fascinating story and it is the opener to a whole chapter on Southeast Asia which paints a very interesting picture of that area and its formation of nation states.
Seth J. Frantzman
 Genocidal Energy Sources: Antiquity, Agrarianism, Racism, and/or Expansionism January 14, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Ben Kiernan has realized a tour de force in clearly explaining to his readers the four usual ideological features of genocides: antiquity, agrarianism, racism, and expansionism. These ideological factors have motivated, in greater or lesser degrees, all military, civilian, racist, or religious perpetrators of genocide over time (p. 572). Kiernan focuses most of his analysis on the six centuries since 1400 C.E (p. 3).
To identify present and past genocides, Kiernan mainly draws on the 1948 C.E. United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and on legal judgments based on that convention for consistency purposes (p. 12). The crime of genocide requires the act of "killing," or another of the specific acts, committed with "intent to destroy" at least part of a protected group (p. 17).
Although Blood and Soil mainly documents genocides committed by Europeans, they have no monopoly on that crime (p. 6). Think for example about Maoism in China (pp. 512-38), Rwanda in Central Africa (pp. 554-68), or non-state actor al Qaeda (pp. 596-604), to quote three recent examples. Kiernan excludes some genocides from his book due to space constraints. Think for instance about the Mongols' slaughter of the inhabitants of Baghdad in 1258 C.E., the Spaniards' destruction of the Inca empire in the 16th century C.E., or the Congo Free State of Belgium's King Leopold II at the turn of the 20th century C.E. (p. 38).
Kiernan notes that genocides are usually undertaken by radical, unstable regimes, who often try to squash any domestic dissent by focusing attention on an external, supposedly common threat (pp. 34, 55-58, 339-49, 393, 409-14, 441, 505, 510-11, 547, 559, 567, 569, 590). Furthermore, Kiernan observes that technological, political, organizational changes that happened in the 20th century make it possible to commit genocide on an "industrial" scale (pp. 393, 454). Think for example about the huge advances in weaponry and the progress made in both communication and transportation in the last 100 years.
Kiernan often quotes verbatim (would-be) perpetrators of genocide in different periods and locations so that readers better recognize the four recurring reasons that are usually advanced to justify genocide.
1) Antiquity: The destruction of Carthage by Rome sets a precedent for genocides committed by Europeans (pp. 51, 58, 186, 387, 422, 605). Al Qaeda has a politicized cult of Islamic antiquity for its projected caliphate (pp. 599-600). In contrast, Russia's Bolsheviks and China's Communist revolutionaries sought a sharp break with their respective country's past, seeking all-out modernization (pp. 394, 512).
2) Agrarianism: The more ancient image of the Garden of Eden, whether as pristine ethnic preserve, uninhabited pastoral idyll, or superior agricultural economy, was widely used by European colonists as an excuse to deprive natives from land ownership, and in some cases, obliterate their presence (pp. 79, 165-69, 217-18, 284, 311-18, 327, 367, 374, 423, 436, 486, 605). Interestingly, Russia's Bolsheviks and China's Communist revolutionaries were against the peasantry because they considered it an alternative power structure to be crushed (pp. 489-503, 526-31). Although the world is increasingly urbanized and industrialized, the aversion to cities and industries, which springs from this same faith in rural virtues, remains potent in the mind of many genocidal perpetrators (pp. 32, 424, 430-32, 536-38, 545, 564, 575, 580, 592, 603-06). For example, Serb perpetrators of the Bosnian genocide regarded their Muslim victims as city dwellers, in contrast to Serb peasants (p. 592).
3) Racism: Many perpetrators have used biological metaphors to justify genocidal massacres (pp. 280-81, 309, 313, 375, 388, 394, 431, 439, 450-51, 475, 483, 559, 566, 587-88, 602). For example, the slogan "Nits make Lice" was used to justify the massacres of Native Americans in the American West and Aborigines in the Australian outback in the 19th century C.E. Other examples include the comparison of Jews to "lice" by the Nazis or the reduction of the Shi'a community to the locus "where the disease lies" according to al Qaeda (p. 606).
4) Expansionism: Imperial and territorial conquests often result in the extermination of local populations (pp. 77, 88, 95, 99-100, 248, 270, 284, 374, 386, 438, 446, 453-55). Think for example about what happened to many Amerindians who were "in the way" of white settlers before and after the independence of the U.S. (pp. 213-48, 310-63). Kiernan also observes that (future) genocidal leaders regularly hail disproportionately from previously "lost" territories beyond the supposedly shrinking prewar homeland. Think for instance about the Young Turks, Nazi Leaders, or the Khmer Rouge (pp. 393, 433, 551-52).
Although some quotes of (would-be) perpetrators of genocide can look and feel like delirium, they should be taken seriously to prevent future genocides (pp. 569, 606). Kiernan demonstrates with much conviction that would-be perpetrators of genocide often telegraph in advance what is awaiting the "undesirables" on their target list once they are at their mercy.
Here follow two recent examples:
1) From 1986, Hutu chauvinist historian Ferdinand Nahimana became a highly influential, multimedia ideologue of the Hutu resistance to Tutsi intrusion which culminated in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi (pp. 560-62).
2) In 1987, the Committee of the Arab Gathering in Darfur, Sudan, sent an ominous letter of ethnic complaint about non-Arab Africans living in the region to the Sudanese prime minister in Khartoum. As the cliche says, the rest is history (pp. 594-96).
As a side note, Kiernan could leverage his in-depth expertise on the subject to write another book that helps countries better deal with the aftermath of genocides. Prosecuting the worst perpetrators of genocides is not enough (p. 415). The recent controversy in the U.S. about what happened to the Armenians living under Ottoman rule during WWI shows that no reconciliation can be seriously considered as long as the past is not dealt with appropriately (pp. 395-415).
An accessible and thorough text on genocide December 23, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Kiernan's books on Cambodia are seen as seminal texts on the subject of the revolution and resulting genocide. Now he extends his writing to cover the history of genocide, and does so in an accessible and engaging way. The chapter on cambodia is particularly good but the entire book is valuable for both academics and secondaty teachers at senior levels seeking sources.
A Very Important Book December 1, 2007
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
After Hitler's mass murder of the Jews people said "Never again". It has been a futile hope so far. What is particularly chilling has been the growth of ethnic and religious mass murder since the fall of the Soviet Union was supposed to usher in a new age of the "democratic peace". Indeed, as Amy Chua has pointed out in her book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability the "new" order of capitalism and democracy has been anything but orderly.
Unfortunately, while the shelves of America's bookstores are groaning under the weight of an almost endless collection of books on the Nazi genocide, there has been little attention the larger issue of genocide in world history and the reasons for it.
This book tries to fill that gap. It should be read in conjunction with Death by Government the best book on political mass murder in the last century. I also have a list of books on the subject of political terror and mass murder in the lists section of my Amazon profile.
This book is higly relevant because the incentives for genocide in the next 100 years are going to be far greater than in the past. Rising world populations and global warming are going to create a greater and more brutal competition for food and resources. Rwanda, for example, was one of the most densely populated nations in Africa.
In 1945 people hoped books like this would only be about the past. Today we hope they will only concern the recent present and the past. However, this book is grim warning about what is likely to happen if our world does not deal effectively with problems like climate change and global poverty. Let's hope nobody will have to write a book about the genocide in our future 50 years form now. Reading this book might give us some ideas of how to prevent a new wave of crimes and horrors.
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