A headstone for mass graves

In the 20th century, “the number of man-made deaths ... is about one hundred million.” So opens “The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead,” a neglected classic by Scottish writer Gil Elliot published 30 years ago. Since its publication, the numbers have appreciably increased. In the Congolese civil wars over the last five years several million have died. Deaths in these numbers block comprehension: One “man-made” death is difficult to fathom -- millions defy understanding.

Yet the effort to comprehend continues and must continue. Some studies assess antagonisms of nations, races and religions; others consider totalitarian states, collapsed economies and demented leaders. Elliot cast his net very wide, including in his totals millions who died in famines like those caused by civil wars in Russia and China. Most endeavors, however, limit their sights in one way or another. Many look only to deaths directly linked to government actions. The very term “genocide” was coined by a forgotten emigre scholar to address the mass killings orchestrated by the Nazi state in the 1930s and ‘40s. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born jurist, put together the Greek word genos, meaning race, nation or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. For years he sought to draw the world’s attention to this new state-sponsored barbarism and managed, in 1948, to get the United Nations to define and ban “the crime of genocide.”

To be sure, the crime precedes the term, and, depending on the definition one favors, genocide can be identified throughout history, from the Roman destruction of Carthage and the decimation of the native peoples in America to contemporary Rwanda and Bosnia. Evidently, genocide is widespread, even if the word and interest in it are relatively new. The novelist Don DeLillo lampooned the founding of Hitler studies in “White Noise,” but he did not anticipate genocide studies. Satire is unnecessary. Yale University established a genocide studies program devoted to “comparative, interdisciplinary, and policy issues relating to the phenomenon of genocide.” Something like “genocide envy” has sprung up among groups who contend for the dubious honor of having being killed en masse: Some commentators suggest that drugs and gangs are genocidal for African American males; even birth control has been called genocidal. In the face of uses like these, the term loses all meaning.

Eric D. Weitz, a University of Minnesota historian, hopes to bring some clarity to this troubled topic. He believes that escalating genocides “stand at the center of our contemporary cultural crisis” and that by using a comparative approach he will distinguish some “common features.” He employs the United Nations definition of genocide as an intent to destroy “in whole or in part” a population defined by race, nationality, religion or ethnicity. Although his book opens with a description of the Armenian genocide, Weitz restricts himself to the analysis of four 20th century cases: the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Serbian-Bosnian war. He omits Rwanda because it stands outside his expertise and the impact of the Soviet or Nazi events, which are the bedrock of his approach. While this exclusion can be justified, his cases predetermine his conclusion. If he had considered Rwanda, his idea of the linkage between utopianism and genocide might be derailed.

As a serious historian, Weitz moves between the specifics of his four cases and a larger theory about genocide, adumbrating several broad commonalities among 20th century genocides: revolutionary utopianism, ideologies of race and nation, and political crises. He gives us five substantial chapters, the first laying out the tortured history of race and nation and the remaining taking up his “cases,” which analyze the play of utopia, nationalism and the evolution of genocide.

As wide as his categories are, Weitz has difficulty finding them everywhere. How does race, for instance, undergird Stalin’s terrorism? Weitz wiggles and worries but frequently slips into academic nospeak to save his point: “The same ambiguities and ambivalence that haunted this discourse [on race] -- the tensions between relatively open and inclusive and harshly exclusive articulations of the nation ... were replicated ... in Russian and Soviet discussions as well.” Stalin’s nationalism “easily lent” itself to racism. “Easily lent” is not exactly a compelling connection, which Weitz ultimately admits. He concludes his Soviet chapter by affirming that Stalin’s Soviet Union did not become a genocidal regime inasmuch as it did not develop a “fully developed racial ideology.”

If Weitz’s first case hardly works for him, what does this say about his categories? Perhaps race is less central to genocide than utopianism. “The movements and regimes discussed in this book,” he concludes, all “promised to create utopia in the here and now.”

Weitz joins a long list of historians and commentators who target “utopianism” as the deadly poison of the modern age. Disenchantment with a supposedly utopian communism has fueled much of this animus, but it is difficult to see how utopianism encourages genocide. Five centuries ago, Thomas More, a saint in the Catholic Church who invented the term and genre of utopia, offered a vision of a world in which “everyone gets a fair share, so there are never any poor men or beggars. Nobody owns anything, but everyone is rich -- for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?” This may be impractical, but it hardly seems murderous.

What was utopian in Milosevic’s violent efforts to create a greater Serbia? Weitz identifies a belligerent Serbian nationalism “imbued with a sense of aggrievement” and a Serbian hatred for Muslims, but where in this is the utopianism? He tosses about and finally offers that “every so often,” “glowing” images of the future appeared in the rhetoric of Serb nationalists. This is not much. Weitz forthrightly concludes that Serbian violence was driven not by a utopian vision but by “the desperate efforts of an old elite to hold onto power.” This case does not confirm a utopian-genocide linkage.

In fact, where is the utopianism in Nazism? Anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic, nationalist, authoritarian, yes, but utopian? The Nazi vision of “a society of domination and subordination, with inferior races providing much of the menial labor that would allow Aryans to pursue higher pleasures” shares little with classical utopias. Weitz emphasizes the mystical, agrarian and communitarian features of Nazism that might seem utopian, but these qualities surface in many benign groups. He tells us that the Nazis promoted whole-grain breads and “greater consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables,” as if this demonstrated a nefarious utopianism. Indeed he informs us that “whole-grain bread was called the ‘final solution’ to the bread question.” He might as well call the current movement for healthy school lunches genocidal. The Nazis did champion a “new” man and woman, but it was less the utopianism of this concept than its racism that proved lethal. The Nazi case hardly establishes a utopian-genocidal tie.

Weitz’s ambitious book ends up with little more than cloudy propositions about utopia, race and nation. He provides valuable discussions of the bureaucratic mechanisms and popular support for genocide, but the decisive role of utopianism remains unconvincing -- and would be even more so if he had tackled the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, a mass killing apparently driven by fear and racial antagonisms, not utopianism.

Unfortunately, Weitz ropes his four cases together by lazy concepts and indifferent writing. He writes of Serbian ethnic cleansing that a killing took place “not unlike the one that resulted in the Holocaust.” The double negative reflects his uncertainty. (Sometimes Weitz can be clear. My favorite short sentence: “Genocides are deadly to the victims.”) Weitz also underestimates the effect of social crises that inform murderous government actions; he barely mentions, for instance, the collapse of the German economy before the rise of the Nazis.

No one can dispute the import of his topic, mass slaughter in the 20th century. It is possible, however, that a survey of scattered cases cannot be written -- or only by pitching it at a level at which its truths are not very illuminating. Comparative efforts are certainly justified, but they require a sharper focus. Fifty years ago, Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” put totalitarianism on the map by starting where Weitz begins, the Soviet and Nazi experiences. The study of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as kindred totalitarian societies has had mixed success, but at least it sticks to interrelated histories. Weitz hardly mentions Arendt’s approach. Instead he goes for something bigger -- and comes up with something smaller.