At the European Union summit in Brussels on 8-9 December 2011, Britain’s Conservative prime minister David Cameron refused to agree to a full EU treaty to support new governance for the eurozone. He was alone among representatives of the twenty-seven member-states in doing so, with the partial exception of three leaders who will consult their parliaments before making a final decision. Thus, Britain will be isolated (or near-isolated) as almost the entire union proceeds to implement the treaty, probably by March 2012.

Cameron’s ostensible reason for using the United Kingdom’s “veto” is that his EU partners rejected his demands to accord special protection to “Britain’s interests” by protecting its financial centre, the City of London. In reality the City was not threatened and is more likely to be undermined by Britain’s self-inflicted pariah status.

Cameron’s position reverses a forty-year stance of engagement (albeit often reluctant) with the rest of Europe by British governments. The overriding reason is that he will do anything to avoid an open split in his Conservative (or Tory) party. The dominant trend in the party is hostile to anything but the most minimal role for the UK in Europe; many Tory MPs and even ministers are Europhobic to the extent that they wish to leave the union altogether (the more common label “Eurosceptic” is inappropriate because it implies that they are open to reason on the subject, which for many is not the case).

For the Europhobes, holding a referendum on Britain’s role in Europe trumps all other political goals. Cameron could not afford the referendum that they would have obliged him to stage over Britain’s signature of any new treaty, since the “wrong” result would have obliged him – thanks both to his international commitments and to his Liberal Democratic coalition partners (who are mostly europhile) – to support a treaty that many in his party would continue fiercely to reject. The ensuing splits in his party and government would be fatal.

The political logic

David Cameron’s European decision belongs to a broader political context. He came to power in 2010 after an election dominated by the reality that the winner would have to manage a major financial crisis (thus the Bank of England’s governor remarked that it was a good election to lose). The outgoing Labour government had already promised cuts in public spending, but Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne announced even deeper austerity measures over a five-year term.

Thus the Conservative-LibDem government faced from the start a huge political task, which Cameron had to handle well if he were to have a chance of being re-elected in 2015. His strategy has been to consolidate his existing electorial base by focusing on cuts to the (traditionally pro-Labour) public sector rather than tax increases for the well-off and rich (his own constituency). At the same time he is trying to rig the electoral system, both by equalising the size of constituency electorates (in principle a democratic demand) and by making electoral registration voluntary (which will reduce the size of the national electorate). The certain outcome of the latter change will be that many people will be excluded – perhaps millions, and most of those young and/or poor.

The strategy, taken as a whole, faces great problems. The combination of the austerity programme and the eurozone crisis has halted the already weak economic recovery, caused tax revenues to fall, and raised indebtness further; already this has led Osborne to extend the deficit-elimination plan by two years beyond the next election, to 2017 (and then only on implausibly optimistic assumptions). Moreover, the prolonged assault on public-sector workers’ pay and pensions is likely to ensure further unrest, following the strikes of 30 November.

Against this background, Cameron’s European “veto” has proved popular with most of his party and the Europhobic press that many voters read. But there is another crucial element in the equation: the “national” one within the UK. Here, the European dimension intersects most acutely with the Scottish one, especially when the Scottish National Party (SNP) government is in power in Edinburgh and plans to hold a Scotland-wide referendum in which the options include full independence and a more limited (if still meaningful) transfer of additional powers to the Scottish parliament.

David Cameron is, like all his fellow Conservatives, a “unionist” (which in Scottish-British terms means a supporter of maintaining the UK as a unified state), and he officially opposes both these options. Yet more covertly, he has reason to favour either. The first, independence, would boost the possibility of the Tories extending their rule in England alone (since in British elections the Conservatives do better there and badly in Scotland, whereas Labour usually needs Scottish and Welsh votes to reach office); the second, additional powers, could be even better, since it would give Cameron a pretext to challenge the right of Scottish members of parliament to vote on English matters (the so-called “West Lothian question”) as a route to consolidate Tory control in England without breaking up the union.

Either way, there is a striking complementarity between the interests of Scottish nationalism (at present generally Europhile) and English Tory nationalism (uniformly Europhobic). The ex-Liberal leader Paddy Ashdown strongly criticises Cameron’s decision in Brussels and says that it offers the SNP leader Alex Salmond “an uncovenanted gift. If England is to be out of Europe, why should Scotland not be in?”

The political logic is an embrace of “Little Tory England” within the shell of the still nominally EU-affiliated and still more or less united, United Kingdom. It will be a country that keeps its nuclear weapons, its seat on the United Nations Security Council, and a high military profile. It will aim to stay a centre of European and world finance, keeping the freedoms to export to and travel in the EU, but with as little as possible to do with any other EU institutions, especially not with the European Convention on Human Rights or any sort of workers’ or social protection.

It will be a country whose financial sector is protected from the kind of regulation that might impinge on the ability of its elite to pay themselves exorbitant salaries and bonuses; whose prime minister proclaims “zero tolerance” for the criminality of rioters but indulges the criminality of powerful media figures in his own social circle; and where the official atmosphere is increasingly aggressive towards the poor, migrants and asylum-seekers. It will, in short, be like the worst of the present UK, but with the danger of further entrenchment as the Tories gain a further electoral advantage from the “loss” of Scotland.

The opposition matrix

This fusion of economic crisis, austerity, public hypocrisy, intra-UK tension, and now a semi-divorce from the Euopean Union suggests that December 2011 is a major turning-point in British politics. But there are other actors in this situation besides David Cameron – and their responses will determine whether Little Tory England is actually realised over the next decade.

A range of potential oppositional forces exist, and possible synergies between different levels of resistance. The Liberal Democrats’ collaboration with Cameron’s retoxified Conservatives has just received a mighty shock, as reflected in the responses to the “veto” of their leader Nick Clegg and business minister Vince Cable (as well as Paddy Ashdown); more fissures are likely, as well as mollifying moves by Cameron to keep the coalition on track.

This moment also presents an opportunity for the extra-parliamentary opposition, in the trade unions, the environmental and women’s groups, and the emerging “occupy” movement. In a parliamentary democracy, a mass movement can succeed only if it engages the political system. In France in 2010, a similar mobilisation against changes to the pensions system, stronger than the British movement is at the present time, escalated its protests through a powerful series of strikes, only to be defeated by a conservative majority in parliament. In Britain, a conservative parliamentary majority exists only through LibDem support. The junior coalition partner will not be easily detached, in part because it fears an early election; but the broad opposition can make any real headway only by increasing the strains inside the coalition.

The opposition needs therefore to combine internet and street-level activism with targeted pressure, especially on the vulnerable element of the coalition. At the same time, the challenge of Little Tory England demands a bolder response from Ed Miliband and Labour: a vision of Europeanism and internationalism that also addresses English concerns, and of social justice in a situation where the living standards of people across the UK are being squeezed while the rich sail on. The task is urgent, before the lockdown of power becomes irreversible.

The great interruption

The terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 had a huge impact on world politics in the following decade, but they did not mark a fundamental change like the 1989-91 upheavals or 2011’s extraordinary beginning of transformation in the Arab world. Indeed looking at 2001 in the light of these more important turning-points shows the limited character of the actions and the modest historical significance of both major protagonists in the subsequent conflict, al-Qaida and the George W Bush administration.

9/11 was an appalling mass murder and marked a quantum-leap in spectacular atrocity politics. Al-Qaida so effectively turned the Hollywood disaster-movie genre against the United States that it became, for a few years, an indispensable actor in world politics; yet the tactic reflected the organisation’s underlying political and military weakness. This has been cruelly exposed in its failure to execute a further major atrocity attack after the Madrid (2004) and London (2005) bombings, and underlined by the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

9/11’s main effects were to prompt President Bush to declare the “global war on terror” and enable him to invade Iraq. But Bush’s overreach also exposed the exaggeration of US power which its apparent victory in the cold war had encouraged. He in turn dissipated the worldwide support for the US after 9/11, provoked a low-grade genocidal civil war in Iraq itself, and left office one of the most discredited presidents in history, his principal legacy the unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Any western success against al-Qaida was down to intelligence and policing, not war or the detention and torture with which Bush besmirched western democracy.

Bin Laden and Bush had in common that they attempted to short-circuit democratic change in world politics, the former with terror attacks and the latter with militarised regime-change. The main effect of their different but mutually reinforcing forms of substitutionism was to interrupt the twin processes of democratisation and legitimate global institution-building which had gained momentum after 1989. But with the fading of al-Qaida and neo-conservatism alike, the Arab revolts have shown a new birth of mass democratic movements and the possibilities of synergy with more responsive action by western governments and United Nations institutions.

In the light of 2011, it is hard to understand how bin Laden ever gained a significant following among Muslims – or Bush among western democrats. Yet during the “great interruption” of the 2000s, superficial journalism and scholarship followed superficial politics in embracing the notion that terrorism was the greatest threat to world society and the struggle against it the great challenge of our times.

We can now see that, however necessary is continuing vigilance against terrorist attacks, counter-terrorism was and is no more than a sideshow of world politics in the 21st century. It may, however, still be an uphill struggle to take the measure of the daunting challenges of democratic change, global equality and legitimate international order: not least because these are posed not just by the heroism of protesters on the Arab street but by the deepening crisis of a dysfunctional world economy.

The overthrow of the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya – messy and incomplete though it remains – represents a striking success for the Arab revolt which began only in December 2010. While the movements in Tunisia and Egypt achieved regime change through peaceful protest, that in Libya has succeeded through armed rebellion, but this moment – awaited by most older Libyans for the forty-two years of Gaddafi’s rule – still belongs to the same wave (see “The global democratic revolution: a new stage“, 7 March 2011).

This victory also represents an important shift in world politics. The synergies between anti-authoritarian movements in the non-western world and international (western and United Nations) governmental action – which were evident in the 1990s but disrupted by George W Bush’s disastrous regime change in Iraq, which substituted military intervention for local democratic action – have been partially restored by the successful Nato intervention in Libya.

These developments are accompanied by two misleading and confused criticisms. First, several observers point out that Nato’s campaign aimed not only at civilian protection (the manifest UN mandate) but also at regime change – though this must be set against the reality that the civilian population had arisen precisely to achieve the latter, and that the threat of violence against them arose from that fact.

Second, it is further argued that there has been an “imperial hijacking” of the Libyan movement, which would never have succeeded without western bombing. The latter point is evidently correct; but more relevant is that the movement was inspired by the courageous actions of everyday Libyans, many of whom (unlike Nato’s leaders and airmen) have given their lives.

Until they began to protest in February 2011 – peacefully at first, and in Tripoli even before Benghazi – western governments (Britain and France prominently among them) were all too happy to sell arms, riot-control gear and anything else to the Libyan dictator (see Fred Halliday, “Libya’s regime at 40: a state of kleptocracy“, 8 September 2009).

Politics amid contradiction

These interpretations ignore the fact that international politics is often contradictory, a reality that revolutions tend to heighten. Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron may be unprincipled politicians, interested mainly in votes and trade, but they nevertheless played a progressive role in Libya: first in preventing the crushing of the revolt, and then in ensuring its success. The significance of their stand is not undermined even by, for example, their use of anti-immigrant politics (in Sarkozy’s case, scaremongering together with Silvio Berlusconi about the new migrants the Libya revolt was unleashing into the European Union); though the more discreet United States involvement was actually the most decisive international contribution.

The fact that some of the mix of elements in the Libyan movement itself are less than attractive is part of this same messy reality. In a society where (unlike Egypt and Tunisia) no independent organisation was allowed, some ex-regime figures have partially dominated the movement (rather like in Romania after the fall of the Nicolae Ceausescu regime in 1989). In the initially unequal military struggle, the rebels had to accept the aid of defecting Gaddafi commanders, which produced (inter alia) a conflict between the movement in Misrata and the National Transitional Council [NTC]). Amidst exaggerated suspicions of the role of mercenaries in Gaddafi’s repression, anti-black racism has surfaced.

In addition, the civil war has clearly produced enormous human costs (as have several of the wars of the last decade). The NTC estimates of 50,000 deaths may prove exaggerated – as many initial estimates tend to do – but large numbers of people have died in the fighting, as TV reports on the overflowing morgues of Tripoli have illustrated. The numbers of wounded and psychologically harmed will be even greater. In this sense the price paid by Libyan society is many times in excess of their co-revolutionaries elsewhere: the death-toll in Syria, which after months of violent repression has been estimated (in late August) at a little over 2,200, is an example.

The armed character of the Libyan movement is undoubtedly very significant for the future. There is proper attention on atrocities committed by rebel fighters, although the regime appears to be responsible for the worst such actions (including a reported massacre of over 100 men in Tripoli). As the rebels move to the exercise of state power, their conduct towards Sirte and other Gaddafi outposts will be a crucial indicator of their respect for the laws of war, and more generally of their ability to produce a viable settlement in Libyan society.

It must be of concern that the struggle has given to young men with weapons such an important role, and this will pose significant challenges to the new Libyan government and to society. In the worst case, continuing challenges from Gaddafi-linked tribes or divisions among the rebels could produce ongoing civil war. However I remain unconvinced (as I argued in April) by easy comparisons with Afghanistan and Iraq (see “Libya: popular revolt, military intervention“, 7 April 2011). The high level of urbanisation of Libyan society and the degree of popular unity in supporting the overthrow of Gaddafi make this a significantly different situation.

The war’s accounting

There remain two crucial questions about the international significance of the Libyan outcome. The first concerns the kind of boost it will give to the emancipatory movement across the Arab world. Now that a band of three countries in north Africa has been liberated from dictatorship, the military-backed Algerian regime will be feeling nervous and even the “reformed” Moroccan monarchy may wonder if it has gone far enough to stave off revolt. The fall of Gaddafi has already been welcomed by those struggling peacefully against the Syrian dictatorship, and has emboldened those in the United States and Europe looking for (non-military) means of helping the protesters.

The second concerns the implications for international politics. Much has been written about the revival of “humanitarian intervention” in a new guise. In reality, Nato’s Libyan campaign is not so different from the Kosovo campaign of March-June 1999; the main difference is that in Libya the alliance between Nato and the rebels has been more open.

Whether Libya creates a new template depends partially on whether this Nato campaign, formally prosecuted in the cause of civilian protection, has actually produced a lower rate of civilian casualties from aerial bombing than others. There have been no reports of Libyan wedding-parties being strafed with the regularity of those in Afghanistan, which may turn out to be significant. The credibly reported incidents of civilian deaths (including one in Zlitan where (according to the Gaddafi regime) eighty-five civilians died) have been relatively few; but as Paul Rogers points out, Nato refuses to account for the casualties it has caused (see “The casualties of war: Libya and beyond“, 7 July 2011). In any event, there will be an accounting – if not from Nato itself, then from independent NGOs or scholars.

I have argued that western bombing campaigns systematically transfer risks from aircrew to the civilians they are supposed to protect (see Afghanistan and Iraq: western wars, genocidal risks“, 24 July 2009). How far did this happen in Libya? It will be interesting to see if surveillance from UN Security Council members, concerned that Nato was overstepping its mandate, actually made a difference. In some other cases (bombing in Afghanistan, drone-warfare in Pakistan and elsewhere), it does seem that relative western indifference to civilian casualties is one of the causes of death. A serious lower civilian death-rate from the Libyan bombing may again raise the spectre of ultra-precise, “humane” intervention. But it will also raise awkward questions about the conduct of operations elsewhere.

For the moment, Nato’s success gives a boost to western governments, which have little else to celebrate as their economies stall. And it puts governments like the Russian and Chinese, which permitted the Libyan venture with some reluctance, on the defensive. But Libya’s transformation may give new life to the Arab upheavals, such as in Syria. There will then be more shocks on the way, and none of the world’s governments can be confident of its future in a world in which the people are once again on the march

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010
128 pp, $12.95 (pbk)

Genocide is an intensely political topic. This type of targeted anti-population violence arises from political and armed conflict and is justified by political ideology. Its discussion always reflects political interests, values and goals: even academic genocide studies are surrounded by critical political issues, and often informed by unstated political assumptions. So The Politics of Genocide is a good title; but for this book, it is a misnomer. Readers looking for a rounded treatment of the subject will be severely disappointed. What Edward Herman, long-time collaborator of Noam Chomsky (who writes the foreword), and his co-author offer us is a politics of genocide, based on the unremitting opposition to Western and especially US power that characterizes all the works of these authors.

This is a study, then, of the contradictions of official Western attitudes to genocide, with a superficial reference (but one significant for the book’s method) to mass media, and brief references to “‘genocide’-oriented intellectuals.” The core case is that all major sectors of the Western establishment are fundamentally compromised by partial attitudes to political violence, according to which some is regarded as “constructive” (committed by Western states and necessary to their aims), some “nefarious” (committed by the West’s enemies), some “benign” (committed by the West’s allies) and some downright “mythical” (supposed actions of the West’s enemies, actually invented for propaganda purposes). This framework, which the authors explain was devised by Herman and Chomsky as long ago as 1973 during the US war in Indochina, defines the book’s four main chapters, each devoted to proving the West’s politically motivated partiality towards violence across a wide range of cases.

The relatively novel element in The Politics of Genocide is the claim that “genocide” language has become increasingly central to the process by which the West interprets events in these four categories: “During the past several decades, the word ‘genocide’ has increased in frequency of use and recklessness of application, so much so that the crime of the 20th century for which the term originally was coined often appears debased” (p 103). Ironically, therefore, Herman and Peterson join many official Western, and especially pro-Israeli, advocates in suggesting a very special (perhaps “unique”?) place for the Holocaust in the modern history of violence. But this reference serves a definite purpose in the authors’ own political framework: if it can be argued that “current [Western] usage” is (as Chomsky puts it, p 7) “an insult to the memory of victims of the Nazis,” then that usage is discredited. And Herman and Peterson’s target is not just this usage, but, as Chomsky summarises, “[t]he vulgar politicization of the concept of genocide, and the ‘emerging international norm’ of humanitarian intervention” (p 10), and especially “all the fine talk about the ‘responsibility to protect’ and the ‘end of impunity’” (p 11). The real problem with the latter, in their view, is that (as Chomsky says) this fine talk “has never once been extended to the victims of these same [Western] powers” that promote it, “no matter how egregious the crimes” (p 11). Thus Chomsky concludes: “As for the term ‘genocide,’ perhaps the most honourable course would be expunge it from the vocabulary until the day, it ever comes, when honesty and integrity can become an international norm” (p 12).

The methodology of this study can be summarized as follows: sweeping assertions about historical events, political attitudes and intellectual positions, buttressed by selective quotation and ignoring most contending sources and arguments, with cavalier use of statistics, all calibrated via a one-dimensional media survey and offered without any attempt to define key concepts. Let us take as a starting-point the following statement: “The leading mainstream experts on ‘genocide’ and mass atrocity crimes today still carefully exclude from consideration the US attacks on Indochina, as well as the 1965-1966 Indonesian massacres within that country – just as they exclude the deaths and destruction that have followed from the United States’ and NATO-bloc’s aggressive wars of the past decade” (p. 17). At this point, one might expect a careful discussion of the “mainstream experts”: but although they are supposed to be an important part of the compromised Western consensus, Herman and Peterson’s sole reference in academic genocide studies is Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell” (2002).# One would not guess that the crimes of pro-Western Indonesia (both the military killings referred to and the invasion and repression of East Timor) are increasingly standard topics in genocide research.# Otherwise, the text is singularly devoid of references to the academic field – even to texts like Adam Jones’ edited Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (2004),# which might have provided partial support for the argument. The other “expert” works adduced are popular handbooks like Roy Gutman and David Rieff’s Crimes of War (1999)#and Christiane Amanpour’s TV documentary, Scream Bloody Murder (2008). It is clear that Herman and Peterson, having dismissed the utility of our field’s main concept, are not interested in what genocide scholars have to say, either.

But let us proceed further with the allegations in this quotation. Herman and Peterson charge genocide experts with ignoring the US attacks on Indochina and the deaths that have followed from the US’s and NATO’s recent wars. For them it is not good enough, moreover, that Power and many others note the role of the US attacks on Cambodia in producing the Khmer Rouge genocide – they also want the direct death toll from US bombing discussed in the genocide framework. But part of the problem is Herman and Peterson’s resolute indifference to conceptual questions. Sure, calling “their” violence “genocide” and “ours” merely “collateral damage” could be not-very-subtle political labelling. But is there any difference at all between “war” and “genocide”? Does saying that the US invasion of Iraq, for example, was war rather than genocide necessarily legitimate the deaths and destruction produced? Or is there a sociological difference between war and genocide, even if they are both morally objectionable? Herman and Peterson are only interested in the numbers of people killed, not in the rationales behind the killings. From their point of view, the difference between Auschwitz and Hiroshima would be only the larger number of people killed in the former. But should we not take into account the different, even if both deeply immoral, aims and motives of the perpetrators in these two events?

The problems of the Herman-Peterson approach are clearly displayed in their treatment of the 2003 Iraq invasion and its aftermath. Quick to entertain an estimate of “more than one million” deaths, they claim that “the media and intellectuals rarely treated Iraqi deaths as a consequence – direct or indirect – of the invasion-occupation, let alone as a deliberately imposed bloodbath, crime against humanity, or ‘genocide’” (p 34). Nowhere are the arguments for much lower death tolls (for example, in the careful estimates of Iraq Body Count, according to which currently about 100-125,000 Iraqi civilians may have died since 2003) addressed.# Nor is there any discussion of who is directly responsible for what is (even on this more conservative estimate) still a very substantial toll, although the majority of deaths are almost certainly directly attributable to Iraqi factions rather than US-UK forces. In this way, an emotive label – “deliberately imposed bloodbath, crime against humanity, or ‘genocide’” – is simply left hanging, so that we are implicitly invited to believe that any or all of these could apply to Western intervention. Paradoxically, the result of this comic-opera treatment is that the authors never pin clearly on the USA and UK either their proper share of the direct responsibility for casualties or their general, indirect responsibility for the mayhem following the invasion.

Herman and Chomsky are the authors of a standard book about mass media, Manufacturing Consent (1994).# Not surprisingly, then, Herman and Peterson’s chief empirical measure of the abuse of “genocide” language is the frequency with which certain key media apply the term to different historical and contemporary events, which is then cross-referenced to their death tolls to suggest the varying ratios of media mentions to deaths. Unfortunately, all the calculations developed from this crude yardstick and scattered throughout this book are undermined if we admit that genocide could actually be a different type of political violence from war. For example, Herman and Peterson make a good deal of the (estimated) 5.4 million victims of the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the low salience of media use of “genocide” language in this case, compared to Rwanda. But they never stop to consider the differences between the two cases. The complicated set of armed conflicts in the DRC involved multiple actors over the course of a decade, each fighting each other in changing alliances as well as variously targeting civilians, with most of the claimed death toll attributed to the disease, hunger, and dislocation which the fighting caused. In the relatively simpler case of Rwanda, a highly coordinated campaign of mass murder was developed during a two-sided war over a few weeks in 1994. There are certainly big “genocide” questions in the DRC wars, but there are good reasons (as well as the bad ones alleged here) to distinguish the application of “genocide” in the two cases.

If there may be good conceptual and analytical reasons for distinguishing between events with similar death tolls, a single quantitative measure cannot straddle the corresponding qualitative divides. Without exploring this question, all Herman and Peterson have done is to provide some evidence of the varying and growing use of the term “genocide.” Of course, related to this, in their haste to assert the significance of Western atrocities, the authors completely sidestep the question of whether, granted that Western democracies commit or are complicit in very serious mass crimes, there is any difference in type between their crimes and those of other regimes; or, indeed, whether there are any significant historical changes in the Western production of mass death, between – say – the eras of Vietnam and Iraq. But Herman and Peterson are not interested in such nuances. Their starting and end point is that “[a] remarkable degree of continuity stretches across the many decades of bribes and threats, economic sanctions, subversion, terrorism, aggression and occupation ordered-up by the policy-making elite of the United States” (p 13).

This whole book is little more than an elaborate demonstration of this and a few (equally simple) related assertions. Naturally, since the USA and the wider West are certainly not innocent of war crimes and complicity in genocide, and since official discourse does indeed tend to assume that “our” actions are justified, our enemies’ nefarious, and our allies’ condonable, Herman and Peterson’s blunderbuss approach achieves some hits. If the mass death produced by the USA in Vietnam and Cambodia did not constitute genocide, we certainly need to ask why. If the Rwandan Hutu Power regime murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, that does not mean we should ignore the death tolls attributable to the Rwandan Patriotic Front before and during 1994, or indeed afterwards in the DRC. If Serbian “ethnic cleansing” constituted genocide, there is no good reason not to examine Croatian expulsions of Serbs, during Operation Storm in 1995, within the same frame. If campaigning in the USA helped to establish Darfur as the prime early-21st-century genocide, it may also have simplified the political and military situation there. These and a number of similar issues, raised by Herman and Peterson, are certainly cogent – and indeed are recognized as such by critical genocide scholars.

However, The Politics of Genocide does not stop at raising these kinds of counter-examples to the Western mainstream. Instead, it engages in what can only be described as extensive genocide denial. Consider two cases. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, our authors claim, the West “demonized” the Serbs, engaged in “remarkable inflation of claims of Serb evil and violence … with fabricated ‘concentration camps,’ ‘rape camps’ and similar Nazi- and Auschwitz-like analogies” (p 46). They criticize the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for agreeing that “genocide could occur in one ‘small geographical area’ (the town of Srebrenica), even where the villainous party had taken the trouble to bus all the women, children and elderly men to safety – that is, incontestably had not killed any but ‘Bosnian Muslim men of military age’” (p 47). “The case for eight thousand ‘men and boys’ being executed,” they say, “is extremely thin, resting in good part on the difficulty of separating executions from battle killings” (p 48). (So, suddenly, they want to distinguish genocide from war, after all.) They point to the eventual acceptance of lower overall Bosnian death tolls (c. 50-100,000 rather than the 200-250,000 initially argued) as evidence of Western “gullibility” in the face of Bosnian Muslim propaganda – ignoring the fact that initial estimates are frequently revised downwards in such situations, and notwithstanding their own eagerness to accept without discussion problematically large counts (like the “over one million” excess deaths in Iraq since 2003, or 5.4 million in the DRC) when it suits their claims. They claim that “the word ‘genocide’ was used lavishly for the Bosnian Serbs’ conduct” (p 49), ignoring the emergence of “ethnic cleansing” as an alternative concept precisely in this period, partly because Western officialdom wanted to avoid recognizing genocide in Bosnia. (Herman and Peterson want to insist on the norm of Western interventionism despite all the evidence produced by Power and many others that often Western governments do their utmost not to intervene.)

If anyone is offering “an insult to the memory of victims,” it is clearly Herman and Peterson, who give credence to Serbian nationalist denialism which has been widely discredited. Yet, if anything, their position on Rwanda is even more outrageous. The Western establishment has “swallowed a propaganda line on Rwanda that turned perpetrator and victim upside-down” (p 51). The RPF not only killed Hutus, but were the “prime genocidaires” (p 54), their “large-scale killing and ethnic cleansing of Hutus by the RPF long before the April-July 1994 period” (p 53) contributing to a result in which “the majority of victims were likely Hutu and not Tutsi” (quoted with approval, p 58). Indeed, “a number of observers as well as participants in the events of 1994 claim that the great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million” (p 58). When we check the reference for this shocking statement, it turns on no more than a letter from a former RPF military officer and personal communications from a former defence counsel before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda – both participants (n 127, p 132). It does not seem to have occurred to the authors that if “theaters where the killing was greatest correlated with spikes in RPF activity” (p 58), killing could just as easily have been committed by the threatened Rwandan regime (as Scott Straus argues in The Order of Genocide)# as by the RPF themselves. But Herman and Peterson do not engage with Straus, or with much at all of the now very considerable literature on Rwanda. Certainly the “established narrative” needs to be questioned, the RPF’s own violence acknowledged, and the ICTR’s inability to deal with the latter (in contrast to the ICTY’s prosecution of perpetrators from many sides, which of course our authors could never credit) criticized. But this is hardly a licence to dismiss the idea of “800,000 or more largely Tutsi deaths” as RPF and Western propaganda, and the authors’ keenness to do so does as much as anything to utterly discredit this study.

This book therefore shows inadvertently that the politics of genocide are multi-directional. Certainly, official Western propagandists may sometimes minimize “our” crimes and represent those of “our” enemies in oversimplified ways. But it seems that anti-Western propagandists, among whom we must count Herman, Peterson, and Chomsky, are guilty of the same tendency from the other side of the fence. They suggest that in official Western narratives, “our victims are unworthy of our attention and indignation, and never suffer ‘genocide’ at our hands” (p 104, italics in original). In anti-Western, Chomskyan narratives, a similar process occurs: the West’s enemies, whether Serbian nationalist or Rwandan Hutu Power, have never committed “genocide.” For the journalist John Pilger, hyping this volume on its cover, Herman and Peterson “defend the right of all of us to a truthful historical memory.” Evidently this does not include the Srebrenica men, the massacred and expelled Kosovo Albanians, or the slaughtered Rwandan Tutsis, who are “unworthy victims” for these left-contrarians. For scholars of genocide studies, this is rich source material. It is not a serious contribution to analysis.

A fully referenced version of this review can be found here.

Also relevant: ‘Mediating Denial‘, my review of Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, editors, Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, London: Pluto, 2000.

Martin Shaw, From Comparative to International Genocide Studies: The International Production of Genocide in Twentieth-Century Europe, European Journal of International Relations, Online First, 11 May 2011 (to be published in the print edition later in 2011 or 2012).

1.  Jürgen Matthäus; Martin Shaw; Omer Bartov; Doris Bergen; Donald Bloxham, Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (review forum), 13, 1 and 2, 2011, 107 – 152. Read a draft of my contribution.

2. Martin Shaw, Jeffrey Alexander et al., Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (book review), 13, 1 and 2, 2011, 181 – 182. Read a draft of this review.

3. Martin Shaw, Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (book review), 13, 1 and 2, 2011, 195 – 197. Read a draft of this review.

(This comment was prepared for publication in the London Evening Standard.)

What a difference six weeks make. In mid-February 2011, largely peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt seemed to be spreading throughout the Arab world, notably in Bahrain, Yemen and Libya. In early April, Bahrain has seen repeated violent repression, Yemen massacres of protesters, and the Libyan revolution has escalated to civil and international war. In Syria, where the protest movement is still spreading mostly strongly, it is also meeting extremely violent opposition.

This is hardly a surprise: revolutions, however peaceful, usually provoke violent counter-revolution. There has been armed repression in all phases of the global democratic revolution – even central Europe’s abnormally peaceful 1989 saw counter-revolutionary violence in Romania, while narrowly avoiding it elsewhere. It is more surprising that authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt gave way without extensive violence, than that the remaining monarchies and republican dynasties are resorting to force.

The idea of an “Arab spring”  conceals a big difference between 2011 and Europe’s 1989. The central European countries benefited from the disintegration of the Soviet empire. Some Arab states are tied in to the looser imperial networks of United States and western power, but local rulers have more autonomy, the US clearly prioritises geopolitical interest over democracy-promotion, and the “empire” is not falling apart.

So the full scale of the challenge facing democratic movements is now becoming apparent. Regimes built up over decades, with efficient security and military apparatuses, habituated to containing and repressing society, will mostly not blow over in the face of a wave of courageous protest. Oil-rich states like Saudi Arabia may combine repression with handouts, but repression is still the core of the response.

Even as more demonstrators fall to regime gunfire in Yemen and Syria, it could be that Libya is where the Arab revolution showed its darker side and began to slow. United Nations and western intervention is unlikely to help the regional momentum unless Gaddafi’s rule collapses with unexpected swiftness.

Yet whatever the immediate outcome in these three crucial states, the Arab revolutions have shown that in the medium term, autocracy is on the way out across one of the world regions in which it has been most entrenched. Democratic change has still to be institutionalised in Egypt, but if it is, it will surely open up the transformed Arab political space still further. Authoritarian rulers everywhere – not least in China – are watching nervously, and with good reason.