Mass Murder vs. Genocide

Technically under the 1948 Genocide Convention it is possible to commit genocide without killing anybody. But, even under more general folk understandings of genocide the numbers involved are not so important as the targeting on an ethno-racial basis. Thus there is a tension between state mass murder in which a regime kills large numbers of people and genocide where they intentionally seek to destroy specific ethno-racial groups, usually minorities even if it involves no killing whatsoever.

Often the two become intertwined to play off the sensationalism of both. For instance the Nazis may have deliberately killed as many as 10 million civilians. But, less than six million of them, some 5.3 million Jews and 200,000 Gypsies are generally considered genocidal. In other cases the proportion of genocidal killings is less. The Soviet regime under Stalin killed close to 12 million civilians. But, the number that could be classed as victims of genocide is a  smaller portion than in the Nazi case. The number of victims of various Stalinist genocides, people targeted on an ethno-racial basis, total about six million of which 4 million were Ukrainians and 1 million Kazakhs perishing from man made famines in the 1930s. The other million being distributed among Germans, Poles, Latvians, Chechens, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and other smaller groups. In both these cases the ethnic killings are emphasized over the non-ethnic ones in particular the Holocaust against Jews and the Holodomor against Ukrainians. The other victims of these regimes have in comparison been largely overlooked in the public historical memory.

The largest case of state mass murder in the 20th century is Mao’s China. It is also far less well remembered in the English speaking world than the mass murder of the Nazis and Stalin regime in large part because genocidal killings were a distinct minority of the total of victims. It is true that Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols suffered disproportionately. But, in total numbers the Tibetans may have lost 800,000 people whereas the total victims of the regime certainly exceeded 30 million people if one includes the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward of which the vast majority of losses were Han Chinese.  Simple mass murder even when on a much larger absolute scale than genocide does not elicit anywhere near the same historical interest.

This all comes to mind because today I received a copy of Ben Kiernan’s The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 from a friend today. Here the melding of separate cases of mass murder and genocide has been perfected. The Khmer Rouge killed about 1.7 million people, the vast majority of whom were ethnic Khmers. The term genocide based upon the Khmer Rouge killings of 350,000 Chams, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thais and Laos gives a power to the Cambodian events that the mass murder of 1.35 million Khmers does not. While the huge numbers of Khmers killed by the regime provides a powerful backlight to the term genocide of the much smaller number of victims from among ethno-racial minorities. As Philip Short has noted that the reason Cambodia received any attention at all was that the 1.35 million (80% of those killed) Khmers killed constitutes a huge number especially given that their total population was under 8 million. But, of course just as in the case of Chinese killing Chinese the killing of Khmers by other Khmers is not genocide since it was not targeted on the basis of ethnicity, race, or nationality. So the term genocide is attached to give it a moral seriousness based upon the identity of 20% of the victims. Which of course highlights the issue that few people care about mass murder as opposed to genocide.

The relative lack of concern for mass murder versus genocide brings a few issues to light. The first is that universalism is an illusion. Nobody considers all people to be equal. Otherwise instead of the Holocaust dominating studies of state mass killing it would be the Great Leap Forward. Second ethno-racial identification still triumphs over just about all other motivations. The reason certain genocides are well studied such as the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, and Rwanda is because they have powerful ethnically based states and well funded ethnic activists behind them. Other victims of genocide such as the Russian Germans, Donauschwaben, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars, and others that lack this backing are far less well studied. Mere mass murder is not completely neglected. But, its study does lack any natural pressure group based upon generational kinship to support its study and popularization. Hence just as in politics ethno-racial identification is the primary motivator in scholarship.