To the Editor:
In his broad-ranging review of Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn’s The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies [Books in Review, January], Steven T. Katz raises many important questions about the meaning of genocide and the comparability of the Holocaust. In passing, he also takes issue with my own treatment of the Armenian genocide. His complex argument cannot be adequately addressed in a short letter to the editor, but I wish to make three points: (1) Mr. Katz’s implied definition of genocide is so narrow that it excludes all other instances of genocide except for the Holocaust; (2) this allows him tautologically to argue that other instances of mass murder like the Armenian genocide were not truly genocide; (3) he does not seem to grasp why other scholars may wish to work with a definition of genocide somewhat broader than his in order to compare the Holocaust to other instances.
A word about the Armenian genocide is in order here. During World War I the “Young Turks” (also known as the Committee of Union and Progress) who headed the Ottoman empire sought to destroy the Armenian minority in order to create a nationally homogeneous Turkey. They claimed that the Armenians had sided with the Russians in the war, and deported the entire Armenian population from the eastern provinces of Turkey toward Syria. Under cover of these deportations, they proceeded to murder and starve the Armenians, until out of a population of some two million before the war, nearly 600,000 had died by 1916, and approximately one million had perished by 1918. It will be recalled that after the war, the Ottomans rallied once again. During the fight to establish a Turkish republic, there were more massacres of minorities, including the Armenians. Thus, between 1914 when World War I commenced and 1923 when the Turkish republic was founded, it is estimated that between one million and one-andone-half million Armenians perished. This suggests that approximately the same proportion of Armenians perished in the Ottoman empire as did Jews in Europe during the Final Solution, if one takes the upper figure as valid.
Scholars of the Ottoman empire point out that the census statistics of the Armenian Patriarchate as well as of the Ottoman authorities are far from reliable. What some authors like Toynbee and Hovannisian have done is to pool and average Patriarchate and Ottoman statistics. Some of my own estimates are based on just such figures. How Mr. Katz arrived at half a million for the total of those who perished in the Armenian genocide I do not know. . . .
But for the sake of the argument, let us grant Mr. Katz his low estimate: does half a million murdered out of a population of some two million not add up to genocide? Apparently not, because Mr. Katz insists on very stringent criteria for what qualifies and what does not qualify as genocide.
Mr. Katz begins his review by selectively quoting with approval from Raphael Lemkin, the distinguished jurist who first coined the term “genocide.” In that definition Lemkin seems to mean that genocide is synonymous with a policy of group annihilation, and anything short of such a policy is not genocide. . . .
Equipped with this definition, . . . Mr. Katz discovers, not surprisingly, that only the Holocaust qualifies as genocide, and that even the Armenian genocide does not. He ends his essay with an almost plaintive question: why is it that Chalk and Jonassohn, as well as other scholars, insist on broadening the definition of genocide? “What is gained?” he asks. Indeed, he suggests that this may be done out of a misplaced sense of sympathy or a soft-headed lack of precision. It seems to me that Mr. Katz confuses the narrowness of a definition with its intellectual rigor. The two are not the same. Indeed, Lemkin himself opted for a broader meaning of the term “genocide” than Mr. Katz allows. . . .
A more widely accepted definition was formulated by the United Nations in its Genocide Convention of 1948:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such. . . .
The crucial terms here are “destroy” and “in whole or in part.” By “destroy” the UN meant acts that included killing and acts that fell short of killing such as interfering with the biological perpetuation of the group. And by “in part and in whole” it implied that mass murder on a vast scale, even where it fell short of annihilation, qualified as genocide.
There can be no doubt that both Lemkin and the drafters of the UN Convention (were they not subjected to political pressures) would have viewed the Armenian genocide as an instance of genocide, even if the proportion of victims was smaller than that of the Final Solution. . . .
Presumably jurists like Lemkin and the drafters of the UN Convention formulated a broader definition of genocide because they wished to condemn and punish all perpetrators of mass murders on a vast scale, not only those like the Nazis who wished to annihilate a whole people. Some historians and social scientists, and I place myself among them, believe that in order to understand an event like the Holocaust, we need to compare it to similar instances like the Armenian genocide, the “auto-genocide” in Cambodia, and even the destruction of the kulaks. We do not claim that these cases are equivalent. There certainly are crucial differences, and the Holocaust is indeed unique in many significant ways. But a comparison of various cases—made possible by a broader definition of genocide than annihilation—permits us to look for common elements as well as differences. It is our hope that the search for such common elements may shed some light on the causes of genocide, including the Holocaust itself.
Robert Melson
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana
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To the Editor:
Steven T. Katz’s review may serve to mislead readers who are not familiar with Mr. Katz’s concealed assumptions, causing them to overlook the value of Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn’s singular work.
Firstly, Mr. Katz implies that classification of a case as an instance of genocide depends on the perpetrator’s attempt (or achieved aim) to kill all members of the group; this is not a criterion either in the definitions of genocide of Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn, Raphael Lemkin, the UN Genocide Convention, or my own (which differs from that of Chalk and Jonassohn). Thus, Mr. Katz tells us blithely that Melos was not a genocide because “only ‘the men of military age were put to death’ ” (was that only 33 percent or 40 percent of the population perhaps?); only 25-33 percent of the kulaks were killed; only 20 percent of the Ukrainians; and under 50 percent of the Armenians (for the latter he uses dubious demography—not cited—which masks Turkish denials of their murders).
Second, Mr. Katz consistently confuses intent with motive: one may intend to destroy a group from many motives (this is explicit in the Chalk and Jonassohn typology) but the motive of the perpetrator is not a necessary element in either a legal or a sociological definition.
Thus, the man-made Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 is not a genocide—according to Mr. Katz—because although it “would eventually consume millions of Ukrainian lives,” the object was “the complete annihilation of Ukrainian nationalism—much like Hitler’s strategy, in, for example, Poland (and elsewhere in Eastern Europe).” Has Mr. Katz forgotten that Lemkin used the latter as an example of genocide? Lemkin noted that Hitler divided occupied peoples into (1) people who should be destroyed immediately and completely; (2) people destroyed directly and indirectly over a period of time (such as the Poles); and (3) groups of related blood who might be Germanized. . . . Both people in categories (1) and (2)—Jews and Poles—were considered victims of genocide by Lemkin.
Third, Mr. Katz’s method of comparison is primitive, using the attributes of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” as necessary criteria. Although Mr. Katz tells us that transcending “moralizing and ethnic parochialism” is a desirable goal, he has not transcended ethnic parochialism but expanded its borders by misusing the Final Solution as the paradigm of genocide. Most scholars of genocide agree that the Final Solution is not a paradigm: although there are common preconditions for genocide, the Final Solution is viewed as singular (for different reasons) by many, resembling other ideological genocides, like that of the Armenians, better than other cases. Mr. Katz then reifies the motive behind this annihilation as the necessary condition for establishing the intent of genocide, glossing over the distinction between intent and motive
Fourth, Mr. Katz relies on discrediting arguments by advancing simple monocausal explanations and shooting them down like straw men. His reduction of Chalk and Jonassohn’s nuanced explanation of the complexity of causes behind the demise of Native Americans in the 19th century is a case in point. Further, susceptibility to “blind epidemic disease” is often related to hunger and malnutrition caused by regime policies or their implementation, both in the Warsaw ghetto and on the American plains—which is not to equate these situations. As Isaiah Trunk noted in his book Judenrat:
One may reasonably infer that even had the Germans not “resettled” the Jews from the ghettos for the purpose of mass killing, they would in any case have died at a “slow” death rate in five or six years.
And that, too, would have been genocide.
In brief, Mr. Katz, for all his learned acumen, has misused and misunderstood the comparative method to make an unassailable case: no other genocide exists but the Holocaust because it is the prototype—its characteristics are the checklist of necessary attributes for categorizing collective murders as genocide. According to Mr. Katz, the Armenians, Cambodians, Ukrainians, and Native Americans must devise another concept for their cases.
Helen Fein
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
In his review of our book, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies Steven T. Katz writes that our definition of genocide is “a very good” one, but argues that our choice of cases “betrays the promise” of that definition. “A real contribution” to the study of genocide, he concludes, must be based on “[p]recision, learning, and the ability to make crucial distinctions.” That is a fair enough principle. Let us measure Mr. Katz’s review by his own standard.
Mr. Katz begins his critique with an examination of what he claims are “a number of their cases,” . . . (our emphasis). He then proceeds to examine a case which is nowhere mentioned in our book—the Assyrian conquest of Palestine between 734-33 B.C.E. and 701 B.C.E.—and presents it as if we had been guilty of misinterpreting it. In his case, Mr. Katz argues that the conquerors pursued a policy of massive deportation rather than total murder. But we agree with this conclusion and he has every reason to know that we agree with it. In our book, quoting E. Ebeling and B. Meissner’s Reallexicon der Assyriologie (1928), we point out “that during the time of the Assyrians whole peoples were driven out of their homelands and resettled in another territory.”
Mr. Katz ignores the fact that throughout our discussion of antiquity we underline the difficulty of interpreting the surviving evidence, not only about Assyria, but about many ancient states. We acknowledge, for example, the contention of H.W.F. Saggs and other scholars who believe that Assyrian savagery has been vastly exaggerated. We also emphasize that “The evidence for genocide in antiquity is circumstantial, inferential, and ambiguous, and it comes to us exclusively from the perpetrators.” Yet there are good reasons to believe that genocide was practiced in the ancient world. We conclude that:
genocide was a relatively common event, for the following reasons: (1) whole empires and peoples have disappeared, and it seems very unlikely that all of them could have disappeared in a short time solely through enslavement and/or assimilation; (2) the reports of extreme cruelty (judged by modern standards) and of extermination are common enough to suggest that such events were not considered to be extraordinary; [and] (3) the religions of most societies in antiquity, as different as they were in other respects, commanded their adherents to exterminate certain groups of nonbelievers or enemies;. . . .
Mr. Katz simply ignores these points in his review.
Mr. Katz compounds his distortion of our arguments with sloppy factual errors and misleading presentations of our arguments. While attacking our analysis of the Athenian destruction of the Melians, he mistakes 478 B.C.E. for 416 B.C.E. and then attributes the error to us by writing: “They refer to the destruction of Melos by Athens in 478 B.C.E.” He falsifies the history of the Albigensian Crusade by claiming that the massacre at Bézier was an exception and that the people of Montségur “were given a chance to abjure,” implying that it was their own fault that they were massacred. This is followed by a diatribe against our discussion of the roots of the Inquisition in the Albigensian Crusade, which in actual fact we deal with in a single sentence arguing that “The difficulties encountered in the suppression of this heresy contributed significantly to the establishment and power of the Inquisition.”
He then tackles our inclusion of the Great Witch-Hunt and even quotes our statement to the effect that we do not consider it a genocide, but this does not deter him from devoting several paragraphs to the argument that it was not a genocide because it killed only a very small proportion of women (“the number of ‘witches’ killed as a percentage of all women in Europe was . . . less than 1/32 of 1 percent . . .”). To our assertion that the Great Witch-Hunt is a precursor of the many 20th-century cases of ideologically-motivated killing, he replies that “this is to get things largely backward.” If this means anything at all, is he asking us to believe that the 20th-century killings were the precursors of the Great Witch-Hunt?
Mr. Katz completely distorts our treatment of Native Americans, charging that we “employ unsubstantiated and unlikely charges of ‘germ warfare.’ ” In fact, we point out that despite charges of germ warfare by other scholars, we know of only one well-documented case, that of the British officers stationed at Fort Pitt who “gave the Delaware Indians a handkerchief and two blankets from the local smallpox hospital in a desperate effort to halt Pontiac’s Revolt.” Indeed, we offer a more conservative interpretation of the germ-warfare issue than did Mr. Katz in an earlier article in Modern Judaism in which he alleged without qualification “abuses of the most sordid kind, for example, passing on to Indians diseased cholera and smallpox blankets which the Indians were known to have no immunity to, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. . . .”
Mr. Katz says that our discussion of the Holocaust deserves “a mixed grade,” but he neither summarizes our argument nor points to specific faults in it. This is strange. One would expect a scholar who believes in the uniqueness of the Holocaust to zero in on our treatment of that vital event in his review. Can it be that Mr. Katz finds it awkward to acknowledge that his analysis of the Holocaust actually parallels our own? In our essay, “The Ultimate Ideological Genocide,” we write: “The Holocaust was unique among genocides in several vital respects that must be recognized” including: (1) “Hitler’s definition of the Jews as members of a subhuman race and his insistence that they be annihilated immediately and totally in order to save Germany and the Aryan race from racial pollution and death”; (2) that the roots of the Holocaust were in Germany, “one of the most scientifically and industrially advanced countries in Europe”; and (3) the modern bureaucratic organization of the Holocaust. We emphasize that “no people in history had ever been attacked by such an array of scientific, industrial, and administrative weapons in a program specifically designed to ensure its complete and immediate biological destruction.” We conclude:
We strongly believe that the Holocaust is part of a larger category of genocides and that it must be compared with earlier cases of mass killing before its origins, its significance, and the measures needed to prevent its recurrence can be understood. Indeed, only by comparing the Holocaust with other cases of genocide can one fully grasp the fact that the Holocaust was the most carefully conceived, the most efficiently implemented, and the most fully realized case of ideologically motivated genocide in the history of the human race and that it represents a type of genocide that is characteristic of aberrant quests for a “perfected” society in our time.
By omitting any mention of these conclusions, Mr. Katz distorts our argument so that we appear to have neglected key elements of the uniqueness of the Holocaust within the history of genocide.
We set out to write a thoughtful, nuanced book on the history and sociology of genocide. We took pains to underline gaps in the evidence, to point out alternative interpretations, and to avoid oversimplifications. Mr. Katz has reviewed a book that we do not recognize. He has ignored our caveats, distorted our arguments, and twisted facts to support his thesis that the Holocaust was the only genocide in history. This is a strange analytical technique for a scholar who believes that a “a real contribution” to the study of genocide must be based on precision, learning, and the ability to make crucial distinctions. . . .
Frank Chalk
Kurt Jonassohn
Departments of History and Sociology
Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec
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Steven T. Katz writes:
Robert Melson objects to my “stringent criteria” for the employment of the term “genocide.” He is in error here for one reason: the definition I work with in my review is that of Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, not my own. What I wanted to show was that most of the cases they include in their anthology do not fit their own definition. It was this inconsistency that was at the heart of my analysis. Mr. Melson is correct that Raphael Lemkin and the UN definition would differ from my definition of genocide were I to propose one—something I did not do in my review—but in that case I think I could show very easily that both Lemkin’s and the UN’s definitions are unusable because they turn out to be so vague as to be irrelevant. For example, in the UN definition, how large a “part” of a population has to be killed for an event to qualify as genocide? The UN definition fails to answer this question, and thus any act of murder—even of one person—i.e., constituting some fraction of 1 percent of a population—could theoretically still be classified under the UN definition as “genocide.”
Mr. Melson replies to my request for precision by arguing that the broader definition he favors will allow us “to condemn and punish all perpetrators of mass murders on a vast scale”—but surely this is a non sequitur. We do not need a new category of genocide in order “to punish all perpetrators of mass murders on a vast scale.” The legal and moral category of murder will suffice for this. Although I too believe in comparing the Holocaust to other mass tragedies, comparison should allow for difference as well as similarity. It may well be, contra Mr. Melson’s assertion, that it is the respect for difference that will shed “light on the causes of genocide, including the Holocaust itself.” The alternative position may obscure rather than illuminate because its reductionism destroys the very particularity of the historical event under analysis.
Finally, as to the statistics of the Armenian tragedy—both Mr. Melson and I recognize that the issue is too complex to discuss in this forum. Let me say, however, that I have tried to be absolutely scrupulous in my demographic calculations (which will be described in detail in Volume 2 of my own forthcoming study of these matters to be published by Oxford University Press).
Helen Fein’s letter is simply confused or in error on every point. Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition does entail the “attempt . . . to kill all members of the group [in question].” The use of the term only when used by me is not a moral term; it is a statistical one relative to the concept of complete annihilation as the purpose of genocide. As for her accusations regarding my “dubious” demographic calculations of the Armenian massacre, those calculations are wholly unrelated to “Turkish denials of [Armenian] murders.” Her accusation is, in fact, offensive both intellectually and morally. I explicitly wrote:
[My] disinclination to label the event as genocide does not entail any diminution of the moral enormity of the crime, or any endorsement of the efforts of Turkish authorities, and certain Turkish scholars, to downplay what occurred.
I would also remind Helen Fein that I was reviewing Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn, not Raphael Lemkin, who wrote in 1942 (published in 1943), and who was, in fact, wrong about many things, including the comparison of the fate of Jews and Poles under Nazism. We, writing in 1991, are not bound by Lemkin’s errors of 1942—except, it seems, if we are Helen Fein.
Yes, I do use the Holocaust as a—not the—paradigm of genocide, but my critique of Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn, as already noted, is based on their criterion, not my own. Having criticized me (incorrectly) for using the Holocaust as the paradigm, Helen Fein does exactly the same thing in making her erroneous argument about my discussion of the Native Americans. She fails to understand that the vast depopulation of Native Americans took place in the 16th century, not the 19th century, and was due to disease at a time when no one understood the “germ” nature of disease in contrast to what occurred in the ghettos of the 1940’s. Though there is no question that disease was abetted by overwork and malnutrition, even without these factors the despoliation of the Native Americans in the 16th century would have been massive, and probably in excess of 90 percent of the indigenous population. It is this fact which makes Fein’s (and Chalk and Jonassohn’s) explanation incorrect. Her philosophically and historically uninformed criticism—falling into the same category of imprecision and confusion as the work she seeks to defend—will not advance the discussion.
Now to Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn’s reply. First, my analysis of their treatment of the classical evidence was necessarily compressed for a review. Let me therefore now fill in a bit more detail.
Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn, while recognizing the confusion presented by the evidence, still feel able to conclude that genocide was “a relatively common event” in the ancient world. They use the Assyrians as their main evidence for this. My countervailing argument, drawn from the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel (which they do not discuss in their book), was intended to show that national conquest does not equal genocide, as their reconstruction suggests. Here I may further note, with regard to their three premises for their conclusion, that (1) the disappearance of empires and peoples is not proof of genocide. In the last hundred years many empires and peoples have disappeared, e.g., the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, and today the Soviet, but none of this entailed genocide. (2) “Reports of extreme cruelty and extermination,” whatever that actually meant in ancient records, are not equivalents of genocide technically defined. (3) The religious “data” are wholly uncertain, as is made clear by the biblical evidence. Moses, for example, is told to destroy Amalek but there is no record that he actually did so; the pronouncements of religious texts are not literal history. As to Melos and the Albigensians, aside from the typo regarding the date of the Melian event, for which I apologize, Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn provide not a single fact to contradict my judgment that neither was an instance of genocide as they define it. Moreover, their obvious unfamiliarity with the events of the Albigensian Crusade makes their denials merely rhetorical.
Moving on to their other medieval “cases,” I note that contrary to their claims to have been misrepresented, they include in their book a reading from Ruthven that centers on the Inquisition, thereby indicating their incompetence in these complex areas of scholarship. The same is true regarding their appalling treatment of the witch craze. They defend the inclusion of this phenomenon in a book supposedly devoted to genocide on the grounds that, though not a case of genocide, “it is a precursor of the many 20th-century cases of ideologically motivated killing.” As I argued in my original review, this is absurd. When I referred to their presentation as “getting things backward,” I meant that Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn see the witch craze as setting the precedent for modern mass murder, when, in fact, it was a medieval crime that is to be distinguished from modern crimes by its limits—a basic point I made explicitly and one that Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn fail to reply to at all, though it is the key issue here.
Their citation of my comments on the destruction of Native Americans in a 1981 essay is dishonest for two reasons. First, my views have changed radically since 1981, as Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn know, having heard my paper at the 1988 Oxford Holocaust Conference, “Remembering for the Future” (reprinted in Vol. 3 of the Conference Proceedings, pp. 200-216). Second, they once again avoid the main issue at stake, grasping for marginal straws instead.
To my comment on their treatment of the Holocaust “as deserving a mixed grade,” they reply that I did not “point to specific faults in it.” This is true and was due to space limitations. (It is nonetheless curious that they spend about a third of their letter discussing the Holocaust which I did not analyze at length and skip over all the cases I criticized in detail!) Therefore, let me say explicitly that to the degree that they concur with my analysis of the Holocaust they are on secure ground. But I still would give a “mixed grade” to their treatment because their summary, as they now acknowledge, is secondhand and unoriginal, and even then does not fully assimilate what it has taken from others. Also, though most of the secondary readings they reproduce are taken from distinguished scholars, the one by Gabrielle Tyrnauer on the Gypsies is terrible. Hence my “mixed grade.”
I note in closing that Messrs. Chalk and Jonassohn have nothing at all to say in response to my critique of their poor work on such central events included in their anthology as the destruction of the Armenians, the gulag, and Cambodia.
