Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern ERA Book

The concluding chapter of Worse Than War by Daniel Goldhagen is titled "What we can do" rather than "What can we do?" From my wordsmithing point of view, that is a good thing except I might have added an exclamation mark. I would like to think that there is definitively something that we, humanity, can do about genocide. We think of Rwanda where the world watched and did not intervene. Then we think of Iraq, where we did.

Wait a minute! Did you say Iraq? Isn't that the place where the U.S. charged in, missiles first, in a preventative attack to protect ourselves against weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida? Genocide was certainly alleged but it was not seen by the U.S. leadership as a reason to jump into Iraq. So, are we talking about doing the right thing for the wrong reason in Iraq? And with genocide is it necessary to step in when the act is being perpetrated or is the following month or year OK? We seem to have a problem deciding quickly if genocide is occurring. Seeing a government killing its own civilians is not necessarily enough.

But wait! Aren't we stepping up in Libya? Have we done the right thing for the right reason? It seems we may have as far as Daniel Goldhagen is concerned. But what about civil wars? And are we obligated to step into every genocide event? This all seems like making political rather than humanitarian decisions. We are told "no boots on the ground in Libya" while it is evidently OK to have boots on the ground in Pakistan to kill a terrorist leader. Maybe the reason Worse Than War is a ponderous book is that we have a lot to think about and to learn. We are blazing a new trail through some dense undergrowth.
Goldhaven says that the U.S. should have intervened in Iraq to stop the genocide and not for the specious reasons put forward at the time. He would support the intervention in Libya and probably in several other countries as well.

Goldhagen advocates swift and certain punishment for those who undertake eliminationist policies with the death penalty leading the way. He supports putting a dead or alive bounty on those in leadership positions orchestrating genocide. He wants a dissolution of the United Nations and the formation in its place of a United Democratic Nations that would prevent, identify and halt genocide. Genocide would typically be stopped by military action by one or more democratic nations. Genocide always happens in the non-democratic, tyrannical nations. I and most of the developed world oppose the death penalty so that is a problem for me. His fall back is mandatory life sentences - unless of course you work within dead or alive with the emphasis on dead. And the idea of invading other countries is one that the U.S. has overused in my lifetime. The U.S. has not been very responsible with the use of invasion and I am not sure I am ready philosophically to embrace that one. But it does seem like we should have done something in Rwanda.

This book is packed with onerous acts and sometimes convoluted sentences and paragraphs. It took me a good deal of determination as well as six weeks with a rest break in the middle to get through its 600 pages. I stick with my three stars: two with an extra one because the ideas in this book are so important.

If you struggle with heavy, nonfiction books like I do, you just might start out watching the PBS documentary based on the book and some of the Goldhagen presentations that you can find on the internet.

Worse Than War Documentary:

Daniel Goldhagen Presentation:


A LOT OF WORDS FOLLOW THAT I WROTE AS I WAS READING THE BOOK. IF YOU HAVE THE PATIENCE AND INTEREST, YOU MIGHT FIND A FEW INTERESTING THINGS HERE AND THERE IN.

Worse Than War by Daniel Goldhagen concludes with an afterword, "Thoughts and Thanks." To better understand the book, that might be the place to start rather than the place to finish. There is not a bibliography but the footnotes include other related books. However, Goldhagen uses other material as sources of "witnesses" to eliminationist events. He is clear that he does not necessarily agree with the conclusions of other such material. He insists on taking responsibility as well as credit for his conclusions. He has a confidence in his conclusions that others have called hubris. It is certain that masses of scholars and experts are not rallying around Goldhagen and his work.

Goldhagen simultaneously acknowledges that we need more evidence while he provides page after page of evidence that we do have: (p 385)

Although we need more evidence to draw firmly grounded general conclusions for certain eliminator assaults, the substantial existing evidence suggests that, overwhelmingly, ordinary people, moved by their hatreds and prejudices, by their beliefs in victims' evil or noxiousness, by their conviction that they and others ought to eliminate the victims, support their countrymen, ethnic group members, or village or communal members' killing, expelling, or brutalizing others - as the Germans did during the Nazi period, as Poles of Jedwabne did , as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe did regarding ethnic Germans, as British settlers in Kenya did, as Bosnian Serbs did, and as Hutu across Rwanda did. The killers, and those near them in their cities, towns, and villages, and especially those dear to them, constitute mutually supportive eliminationist communities.

From here the books goes into significant detail including examples where the perpetrators of genocide were within a supportive community.

And still it is hard to believe:

From Machete Season The Killers in Rwanda Speak by Jean Hatzfeld:

The principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs… A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor - they all killed with their own hands. … These well educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes.

Yet we refuse to believe.

It is hard to overcome established facts. And that is what Daniel Goldhagen is trying to do with his work on eliminationism. The holocaust is so well studied and documented that most issues seem to be settled facts. Goldhagen has tried to reverse "settled facts" with his holocaust theory in Hitler's Willing Executioners and has gotten a lot of attention but few converts.

Maybe he just started at the wrong end of the elephant. Maybe he should have written Worse Than War first as the big picture of genocide based on a multitude of examples and then followed up with applying his theories to the holocaust once he had some traction. In Worse Than War he lays out considerable historical information that supports his theories. With the many examples of genocide in the 20th century, he has the help of much empirical evidence to make his case. He takes the position that genocide is systemic and that, as a result, the specific genocides have similar causes and patterns. This list of eliminationist incidents is long and many are well documented.

His biggest shortcoming may be that he is something of a lone wolf. Quite a few footnotes in Worse Than War are references to his own previous work! He gives no evidence of collaboration or cross pollination with other genocide scholars. He is not joined in his efforts to explain the origins of genocide and the ways to prevent future genocides. He is also trying to coin a new phrase, eliminationism, a continuum of which genocide is one extreme point. You do not find others using that phrase. Inventing new terminology can be an ego thing that is often resisted by the establishment.

In Worse than War: Genocide Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity Daniel Goldhagen attacks what he calls 'eliminationism' in the world so aggressively that he has been criticized and discounted for his zeal. Beginning in 1997 with the book Hitler's Willing Executioners, Goldhagen has sharply challenged some of our beliefs about the Holocaust in particular and now genocide. He defines and describes the huge topic of genocide as a continuum of atrocities including transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, and annihilation. He calls these horrors eliminationism, the acts of eliminating a whole people or group. "By any reasonable accounting, mass murder and elimination have been more lethal than war'" asserts Goldhagen who gives statistics to back up that claim. Thus the title Worse Than War.

I was unaware of the controversy that surrounds Goldhagen until I began reading Worse Than War. This is one of those books that will make you wonder "What is true?" We have the commonly accepted explanations of events and then we have this contradictory point of view. From the controversy that surrounds Goldhaven's work it is clear that there are many well informed and thoughtful people who reject his conclusions. The exchanges have not always been polite.

I have diligently read the first 250 pages (out of 650)of Worse Than War. Goldhagen makes a detailed argument and proof of his conclusions. He provides a wealth of data but it is hard for me to understand where information moves from anecdotal to verifiably factual. The content is complex and has not been presented in the best way for my understanding. The book is ponderous. It would be easy to criticize based on the writing style alone that is convoluted and repetitious. I am putting the book down temporarily because I need a rest from both the subject and the style.

I am temporarily giving the book three stars because the topic is so important and relevant in the 21st century where eliminationism and war seem to be the world's normal state. If you are interested and concerned about the topic, I encourage you to put Worse Than War on your to-read shelf for further consideration.

Addendum: Maybe if you watch this documentary online, you will want to read the book. But Daniel Goldhagen observed that a picture is worth many more than a thousand words. It might be harder to watch than to read. Let me know if you are moved by this. Think about Libya. Mr. Goldhagen previews what NATO is doing there. We will see how it comes out.


Addendum but still prior to finishing the book. May 28, 2011

And since most of us are not experts on the subject, we must to some extent make a leap of faith to land on one side of the river bank or the other. Leap of faith is not a very satisfactory method of analysis. Mr. Goldhagen is, by training, a historian. What we are examining here is much more than a historical event. Not only is genocide a thing of history but also a thing of current events. The nearness of the events in Rwanda and Darfur, for example, make it impossible to step back and have a dispassionate view. At the same time, we have hundreds of thousands of witnesses to the current events.

Because this book advances some new ideas, ideas that conflict with some of the 'facts' known by many people for many years, I want to find some kind of empirical study here with statistics and charts and graphs. I want to see the psychological and sociological data so I can understand the conclusions of the author. It seems to me that not much of this exists in the book and I am not sure that it exists anywhere but in the mind of the author who obviously has done exhaustive academic work. But, still, it comes down to words and the reader's decision about the believability of those words. One can take the arguments logically or emotionally. From the controversy that surrounds Goldhagen's work it is clear that there are many well informed and thoughtful people who reject his conclusions.

In some way this idea of eliminationism seems like it should be approachable with empirical data; could we not interview a large number of people who participated in the described events as a perpetrator, a victim, or an observer? It the suggestion is that is what Mr. Goldhagen has done: but he has not talked directly with the subjects but relied on previous writing and a vast amount of historical data from many archives and direct sources.

The Holocaust is probably the most well studied genocide in recent history. Other events that are listed and described in the book are much more sparsely documented. Because the Holocaust is a historical event rather than a current event, many conclusions have been drawn and accepted over the years. Serious scholars and casual observers have many 'facts' that have been in the confirmed and intellectual realm for seventy years. There are many reasons other than scholarship that may make most people hesitant to reject or modify those facts. The people who were actually there are becoming more and more scarce as the years pass. The content and veracity of living witnesses will soon be gone.

Goldhagen makes a detailed argument and proof of his conclusions. He provides a wealth of data but it is hard for me to understand where information moves from anecdotal to verifiably factual. The book is ponderous in size and complexity. Goldhagen rejects some of the time-tested 'facts' in a dismissive and disrespectful manner. In some way this is a contest of competing 'obvious' facts. Facts that are so self evident that they do not even require proof. Goldhagen does appear to make an effort to go back and dispassionately examine some of the background assumptions. He then provides a verbal summary of the contradictory conclusions.