Genocide: A World History by Norman M. Naimark (review)

Genocide is “ubiquitous in the history of mankind” (3). That was the conclusion advanced by Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term; drew modern attention to the religious, racial, and political extermination or attempted extermination of a people or a group on those or any other grounds; and zealously promoted what became the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Unfortunately, Lemkin had to compromise on the final central wording of the Convention. Its definition was watered down merely (but still importantly) to single out acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such (3).”¹

This book is a deft, accessible, survey of humankind’s assault on groups out of favor with rulers and hegemonic imperial or national powers. Beginning with a quick glance at the Old Testament (“Thou shall smite them, and utterly destroy them”); the Trojan War; Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War; and Rome’s antipathy toward Carthage, Naimark chronicles ruthless episodes of genocide almost from the beginning of recorded time. “The character of genocide,” he rightly writes, “has many similarities across [the centuries].” At the command of political rulers invoking ideology, gods, and so on, “the killing is intentional, total, and eliminationist” (14).

What is unusual in a recounting of genocide, Naimark then discusses the extirpation of whole peoples by the Mongols in what is now Uzbekistan, Iran, and Hungary. Each event was killing by intent (Lemkin’s language). Even before the Mongols, Crusaders “cleansed” the Holy Land of Muslims, Pope Urban II specifically exhorted his “heralds of Christ” to “exterminate” the “vile race” who stood in their way (25).

The conquests of New Spain, of the Caribbean island peoples, of North America, of southern Africa, and of Australasia were all in this same tradition of elimination of “the other”—the people in the way, the people whose lands or riches were coveted by the invaders and occupiers. Hardly any incomers are spared, or should be spared—the Whiggish scrutiny of the present.

Naimark’s brisk account is on less contestable and less conceivably anachronistic ground, however, when he discusses German genocides against the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia, the Ottoman Turkish elimination of Armenians in Anatolia, the contemporaneous Ottoman Turkish assaults on the Assyrian Orthodox and Pontic Greek populations in what is now Turkey, the enormity of the Holocaust, the Soviet mass killings of Ukranians and others of their own “peoples”; the Chinese victims of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward (or Backward); and the much more recent targeting of innocent fellow Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge. A penultimate chapter brings this horrific story relatively up to date with a recounting of the genocidal actions of despots and their acolytes in the Sudan and the South Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Serbia.

This sober survey of what historians should not neglect is a welcome overview of, and a guide to, events that need much more retrospective investigation and explication. There is nothing interdisciplinary about this book except for its subject matter. But that subject matter does help to remind us of aspects of the past that we may have overlooked, given short shrift, or simply avoided exploring. Now is a time to begin engaging in such a re-examination.