Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (review)

With varying acuity, some important instances of mass murder or genocide have been analyzed by scholars expert in the history and in the culture of the people involved. Mass violence has been so widespread in the modern world that other scholars, not necessarily expert in any one area, have been tempted to juxtapose two or more instances in order to discover underlying patterns and explanations. Scholars have come to understand that comparison does not necessarily imply equivalence; the divergences often prove more instructive.

The founder and editor of the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, Jacques Semelin, is professor of political science and research director at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationale (CERI) in Paris. His previous publications have focused on Nazi Germany. Unlike earlier scholars who juxtaposed the political histories of two or more genocides, Semelin identifies “common problematics” (p. 382) that he analyzes in the light of three main cases (the Shoah, the violence in Yugoslavia, and the Rwandan Genocide) and several secondary cases such as the Cambodian Genocide and mass death in the Gulag.

The problem areas that Semelin treats structure the volume: Part I: The Imaginary Constructs of Social Destructiveness; Part II: From Inflammatory Discourse to Sacrificial Violence; Part III: International Context, War, and the Media; Part IV: The Dynamics of Mass Murder; Part V: The Vertigo of Impunity; and Part VI: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. This topical focus allows Semelin to elaborate important questions and insights without having to recapitulate the histories of the cases he examines. Space precludes discussing all six in detail, but a schematic discussion of the first section may illustrate Semelin’s methodology and the range of studies that he brings to bear.

Semelin emphasizes that mass murder may start when crises such as economic collapse, invasion, or civil war intensify the fears of a population, leading to a “collective trauma” (p. 15). By themselves such situations do not lead to mass violence against a vulnerable supposed enemy without a crucial intervening step, “a mental process . . . of seeing some ‘Other’ being and stigmatizing him, debasing him, and morally obliterating him before actually killing him” (p. 9). By destroying the hated Other, mass murder alleviates collective anxiety and effects a process of “purification” that also reshapes the identity of the killers. During the Holocaust Germans attacked, expelled, and killed Jews—the presumed cause of all their problems—symbolically overcoming the trauma of defeat in World War I and the ensuing economic and political crises. By purging German society and culture, the Nazis sought to transform the identity of the defeated and humiliated Germans into that of all-powerful, vengeful, victorious Aryans.

Semelin stresses that cultural differences in themselves do not lead to processes of purification and destruction; nor is group hatred necessarily the starting point leading to mass murder. Cultural groups can live side by side quite peacefully, and group hatred is often a by-product, not the cause, of violence. When groups become fearful and political entrepreneurs learn to accumulate power by inventing enemies, violence may be triggered. Before World War I antisemitism may have been common in Germany, but without the rise of the Nazis and their effort to refocus German anxieties on the Jews, there would have been no Holocaust. Similarly, Rwanda may have witnessed Hutu-Tutsi tensions and even violence during the colonial and post-colonial periods, but it was the desire of the Hutu leadership to cling to power after independence that motivated it to channel Hutu fears onto an imaginary Tutsi threat.

By the same token, cultural proximity does not protect from violence and mass murder. Drawing on Michael Ignatieff’s application of Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences” (pp. 28–29), Semelin notes that many instances of mass violence have occurred between groups culturally quite close. Serbs and Croats turned on each other, and Hutu attacked Tutsi, while initially the Nazis singled out German Jews, the majority...