History’s early warning signs of genocide

The University of Queensland’s Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect has launched a new program on the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, which it calls “the single most important element” of its mandate. The program’s leader, historian Deborah Mayersen, is the author of a Melbourne University doctoral dissertation entitled Countdown to Genocide.

The new Queensland program is part of a worldwide attempt to stop genocides by recognising early warning signs and acting to prevent them. In addition to tracking proximate causes of genocides, scholars and activists can draw on historical cases to identify possible perpetrators and propose timely preventive action.

History’s most extreme and most extensive case of genocide was the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews during World War II. Warning signs of a murderous project appeared well in advance. For example, as early as 1924, Adolf Hitler mused in his book Mein Kampf that during World War I, if only … “twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas”.

In addition to such proclamations, other warning signs, present in most genocides throughout history, also escaped much notice during Hitler’s rise to power. Besides racism and religious hatred, which in Hitler’s case combined in a vicious anti-Semitism, three other factors have recurred through the centuries. Genocidal leaders have often been preoccupied with antiquity and have envisaged themselves as heirs of a sometimes mythical ancient heritage. They have also been aggressively expansionist and have combined their hunger for territory with a conviction that only people of their own nationality and race are equipped to farm or use the land. Along with their historical fetishes and expansionism, this agrarian preoccupation often leads perpetrators to despise and distrust forest or city dwellers.

For example, in Mein Kampf, Hitler complemented his vicious anti-Semitism with early inklings of a historical fantasy. He conjured up a mythical, pristine, agrarian Germandom, whose people had supposedly once farmed and fought over large territories. He praised the ancient Arminius (“Hermann”), who annihilated Roman legions, as “the first architect of our liberty”. To Hitler, Roman history was “the best mentor,” and Rome’s genocide of Carthage in 146BC, the “execution of a people through its own deserts”. Classical Sparta was another Nazi model, “the first racialist state”.

Along with ancient precedents, Hitler fantasised about agriculture. “I’ve just learnt,” he remarked after invading the USSR in 1941, that Roman army rations were “based on cereals”. With new German agricultural settlement, Nazi-occupied Ukraine and Russia could become “the granaries of Europe”. Germans were more advanced, Hitler claimed, because “Our ancestors were all peasants”. The German peasant “zealously exploited … every inch of ground,” and “Nothing is lovelier than horticulture”. Besides, “A solid stock of small and middle peasants has been at all times the best protection against social evils.” Nazi agrarianism, which characterised Jews as town-dwellers, reinforced anti-Semitic hatred.

Similar telltale racist, rural, archaic and expansionist thinking can be detected through the centuries in the mindset of many other genocide perpetrators and may be spotted in advance by those seeking to prevent future catastrophes.

If this cluster of attitudes on Hitler’s part forewarned the worst genocide in history, it also accompanied one of the earliest. Roman senator Marcus Porcius Cato, author of perhaps the first recorded incitement to genocide, “Delenda Est Carthago” (Carthage Must be Destroyed), was an expansionist and agrarianist, determined to preserve Roman rural values against mercantile threats like Carthage. While Cato claimed descent from Spartans, his work De Agri Cultura began: “it is from the farming class that the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most highly respected.”

Genocides of indigenous peoples around the world have also betrayed preoccupations with antiquity, agrarianism, and empire. In the United States, the slaughter of Native Americans lasted more than a century, through a variety of political regimes. Yet, the justifications for killing stayed remarkably similar. In 1838, the second president of the short-lived Republic of Texas, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, abandoned his predecessor Sam Houston’s policy of reconciliation with Indians, and moved to exterminate Cherokees and Comanches. Lamar announced: “Our young Republic has been formed by a Spartan spirit. Let it progress and ripen into Roman firmness, and Athenian gracefulness and wisdom.”

Like Rome besieged by barbarians, Lamar saw Indians attacking Texas with “Vandalic ferocity”. He imagined the Republic, “her vast extent of territory, stretching from the Sabine to the Pacific, and away to the Southwest as far as the obstinacy of the enemy may render it necessary for the sword to make the boundary; embracing the most delightful climate and the richest soil in the world, and behold it all in the state of high cultivation”. The consequences were dire for Indians.

Yet California was possibly the most extreme case. After the US annexed it in 1845, California’s Indian population fell from more than 100,000 to only 15,000. The San Francisco newspaper Alta California predicted in 1850 that Indians would vanish “like a dissipating mist before the morning sun from the presence of the Saxon”.

The US governor of California predicted that “[a] war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct”. His successor repeated that unless Indians surrendered their lands, the state would “make war upon” them, “which must of necessity be one of extermination of many of the tribes”. A San Francisco paper agreed: “Extermination is the quickest and cheapest remedy.”

Diseases, killings, and enslavement devastated northern California Indians in particular. Alta California reported: “Nearly all the children belonging to some of the Indian tribes in the northern part of the state have been stolen.” The state superintendent of Indian Affairs reported to Washington in 1856 that some “entire tribes were taken en mass”.

After US troops had massacred more than 250 California Indians by 1850, settler militia and volunteers killed thousands more. Over 2,000 Yana were reduced to 100, the estimated 12,000 Yuki to as few as 600. US Army major Edward Johnson stated in 1859: “The whites have waged a relentless war of extermination against the Yukas, making no distinction between the innocent and the guilty. … Some six hundred have been killed in the last year.” The San Francisco Bulletin commented: “Even the record of Spanish butcheries in Mexico and Peru has nothing so diabolical.”

J. Ross Browne, appointed by the US to investigate, later wrote sardonically that the violence stemmed in part from a commitment to “yeoman” farmers: “The federal government, as is usual in cases where the lives of valuable voters are at stake, was forced to interfere. Troops were sent out to aid the settlers in slaughtering the Indians. By means of mounted howitzers, muskets, Minie rifles, dragoon pistols, and sabres, a good many were cut to pieces. But on the whole, the general policy of the government was pacific. It was not designed to kill any more Indians than might be necessary to secure the adhesion of the honest yeomanry of the state.”

In the 20th century, territorial expansion and cults of agrarianism and antiquity preoccupied perpetrators even more. Before the genocide of a million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the Young Turk ideologue Yusuf Akçura asserted that “the general trend of our era involves races”. He dreamed of an empire of all Turkic-speaking peoples “from Peking to Montenegro”. And Akçura considered the peasantry “the basic matter of the Turkish nation”. Other Young Turks also stressed the role of the “small farmer,” and thought the Turks belonged to an ancient “Turanian” subsection of the Aryan race.

Ziya Gökalp, a theoretician of the “pan-Turanian” movement, predicted in 1914: “Turkey shall be enlarged and become Turan.” He viewed “Greeks, Armenians, and Jews” as “a foreign body in the national Turkish state”. To expansionism and racism, Gökalp added a cult of Turkic antiquity: re-establishment of the golden age of pre-Islamic Turkic military leaders, like Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Turkish armies pushing east would find their own origins “in the steppes of Central Asia”.

Currently, some of the top perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s are finally being tried in a UN-sponsored Tribunal in Phnom Penh. Several of the Khmer Rouge leaders, including “Brother Number One”, Pol Pot, have already died. As a youth, Pol Pot had termed himself the “Original Khmer”.

His regime’s 1976 guidebook to Cambodia’s ancient temples began: “Angkor Wat had been built between 1113 and 1152.” Ancient enemies like the local Cham minority, victims of genocide under Pol Pot in 1975-79, were perennial. The temple of Angkor Thom, the guidebook went on, was built “after the invasion of Cham troops in 1177, who had completely destroyed the capital”. Pol Pot added: “If our people can make Angkor, we can make anything.”

His Khmer Rouge victory in 1975 was of “greater significance than the Angkor period”. Stalinism and Maoism offered Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea a means to revolutionise Cambodia and rival its medieval model. The emptying by force of Cambodia’s supposedly foreign-contaminated cities would restore the rural tradition of an imagined era when “our society used to be good and clean”.

In ancient times, Rwanda was a peaceful Hutu realm, wrote a perpetrator of the 1994 genocide there. Hutus, he said, “were living harmoniously since as early as the 9th century”. Then, supposedly in the 16th century, came a race of interlopers, the “Tutsis from Abyssinia”. A Hutu Power radio station added an agrarian theme: “Tutsi are nomads and invaders who came to Rwanda in search of pasture.”

During the 1994 genocide, the radio urged audiences to “exterminate the Tutsi from the globe”. A listener who became a killer recalled broadcasts saying, “while a Hutu is cultivating, he has a gun,” and “When the enemy comes up, you shoot at each other. When he retreats, then you take up your hoe and cultivate!” The hunt for Tutsis was expressed in agrarian slogans like “separate the grass from the millet,” and “pull out the poison ivy together with its roots”.

Modernisation and urbanisation, accelerating worldwide since 1945, have broadly undermined traditional rural communities, but that has only intensified the narrow demands of extremist groups for restoration of pristine identities, including racial and agrarian values, and the recovery of “lost” territories. The racist fear of “contamination” often goes hand in hand with notions of the utility and virtue of the small farmer, the loss of a glorious past, and the brutal imperative of territorial conquest. In combination, these notions have led to genocide. Their expression may provide early warning of catastrophes to come.

Others may already be in progress, especially among remote indigenous communities that do not receive the attention they deserve. Small Indian groups in the Amazon region are very vulnerable. According to The Economist, Ecuador’s rainforest “is shrinking faster than in neighbouring countries (by 1.67 per cent a year). It has been ravaged by logging, poachers and oil extraction … Native tribes have been uprooted, forced deeper into the forest or have disappeared.” The New York Times recently reported of Brazil’s Kamayurá people, “A Tribal Extinction is Feared as the Rainforest Falls”.

Especially now that we have the knowledge to identify a cluster of factors that point toward possible genocide, the international community has a responsibility to protect such people.