The Cherry Orchard

Our inquiry into the meaning of “genocide” continues. Yesterday we looked at the most common template for genocide, in which a “suspect” minority is attacked in time of war. The Armenian massacre, the Jewish Holocaust and the Rwandan massacre all fit this pattern, and so do the the horrifying crimes Saddam Hussein committed against Kurds in northern Iraq during the final years of the Iran-Iraq War. Recent genocidal disasters in the former Yugoslavia (involving Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo and Albania) fit this pattern as well, and so does the genocide currently raging in civil-war torn Darfur.

But it’s too early to conclude that war is the necessary and sufficient explanation for genocide, because (strangely enough) the two worst genocides of the last hundred years contradict this thesis completely. The two worst recorded genocides of all time took place during peacetime, and were targeted against utterly placid and defenseless people. I’m speaking of the two forced famines that decimated the peasantry of Russia in the 1930’s and the peasantry of China in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and of the two incredible monsters who committed these acts. Ladies and gentleman, meet the two champions in the all time pantheon of bureaucratic murder: Joseph Stalin (7 million deaths in 2 years) and Mao Zedong (20 to 30 million deaths in 3 years).

Unlike the Jews or Armenians of Europe or Tutsis of Rwanda, the victims of the vast Russian and Chinese genocides never had the catharsis of victory or judgement against their persecutors. Joseph Stalin decimated his nation’s population and went on to rule as the Great Father of Russia for 20 more years until his death in 1953. Chairman Mao decimated his nation’s population and went on to rule as the mystical oracle of China for 25 more years until his death in 1976. Neither nation has ever mourned for its sins. You think Turkey is in denial? Let’s talk about China if you want to talk about denial …

But let’s start with Russia and Joseph Stalin, because his holocaust came first. Stalin, newly powerful as the sole leader of the fledgling Communist nation, embarked in 1931 on an aggressive program of farm collectivization designed to “increase productivity” and erase bourgouis notions of private ownership across the Russian countryside. Collectivization was a Marxist ideal, but in Stalin’s perverse hands the idealistic project never had a chance, because the farmers were essentially transformed into slaves.

They could not keep up with required yields, and the result was a national starvation. It’s not clear to what extent the government leaders in Moscow cared that the great agricultural project had failed, and to what extent they were actively scheming to trim their population by forced famine.

Thirty years later this pattern repeated itself almost exactly in China, which also suffered from economic problems due to population excess. The similarities between Russia’s “Five Year Plan” and China’s “Great Leap Forward” are quite stunning, though Mao’s scale was significantly larger.

Fifteen years later, yet another Communist dictator, Pol Pot of Cambodia, carried out a program of genocide against his own population that also resembled the Russian and Chinese atrocities. Victims were estimated at 1.7 million.

The Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot template — genocide for population control — provides a strong contrast to the more common war-based genocide template we discussed yesterday.

Despite the strong contrast, though, one principle stands: genocide always serves a functional purpose. Whether the purpose is economic (Russia, China, Cambodia) or military/strategic (Turkey, Nazi Europe, Iraq, the Balkans, Rwanda, Darfur), genocides don’t happen by accident. Genocides happen because governments plan them.

Comments welcome again … and I’ll write another installment on this topic tomorrow.