Final Solutions

FINAL SOLUTIONS: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century. By Benjamin A. Valentino. Cornell Univ. Press. 317 pp. $29.95

“If we hope to anticipate mass killing, we must begin to think of it in the same way its perpetrators do,” writes Benjamin Valentino, a political scientist at Dartmouth College. Isn’t mass killing simply the outermost consequence of irrational group hatred? That’s the traditional perspective on it, but Valentino believes otherwise. In his view, mass killing represents a rational choice of elites to achieve or stay in political power in the face of perceived threats to their dominance.

Valentino develops his argument through eight case studies. Three fit the legal definition of genocide (the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a “national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”): Armenia, the Holocaust, and Rwanda. The remaining five amount to what political scientist Barbara Harff calls “politicide,” mass killing for political reasons: Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, Guatemala, and Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. By emphasizing cases of politicide over those of genocide, Valentino stacks the deck in favor of his politics-centered argument from the start.

He convincingly demonstrates how communist collectivization in the Soviet Union and China led to unparalleled mass murder, but his case is weaker for some of the other instances of politicide. What begins as rational political opposition to an insurgency can expose cultural fault lines of irrational ethnic hatred. In Guatemala, for example, an anticommunist counterinsurgency turned into a genocidal war against the Mayan Indians who supported the communist guerrillas. Whole Mayan villages were slaughtered, men, wom­en, and children—yet Valentino denies the racial, ethnic aspect of the war. In Afghan­istan, too, he downplays the ethnic, religious, and nationalistic roots of the resistance to Soviet occupation.

Valentino’s argument is least successful in accounting for genocide. As causes of genocide, he believes that dehumanizing attitudes, a nondemocratic government, and ethnic hatred are “secondary to deeper political and military conflicts,” though other scholars have shown them to be strong predictors. The Holocaust and the Armenian and Rwandan genocides were last resorts, Valentino contends, undertaken only after emigration and deportation failed to bring about ethnic cleansing of the respective societies. But he doesn’t adequately address why ethnic cleansing was the goal to start with; Jews, for example, were no threat to German survival except in Hitler’s fantasies. Mass killing, moreover, wasn’t a mere last resort: The Turks deported Armenians into the Syrian desert as a method of genocide, not an alternative to it, and Hutu extremists allowed no Tutsi to escape from Rwanda in 1994.

Rational means, Max Weber observed, can be adopted to achieve the most irrational ends. The meticulous planning of the death camps was a rational means to an utterly irrational end, a Jew-free Europe. Valentino minimizes the fact that the irrational ends of genocide mostly arise out of nationalism, ethnic hatred, religious intolerance, and racism.

Despite its shortcomings, Valentino’s strategic perspective on mass killing produces an extremely useful conclusion: The best strat­egy for prevention is to remove those leaders likely to commit mass murder. But regime change by international intervention has not yet become an accepted norm, even to stop genocide. Some 5,500 heavy infantry with a strong mandate might have prevented the genocide in Rwanda. Instead, the United Nations withdrew. In Darfur, we see that the lessons of Rwanda haven’t yet been learned.

—Gregory H. Stanton