Indicting liberal democracy for genocide.

AS CONTEMPORARY EVENTS in Darfur and Kenya illustrate, it seems that genocide and genocidal violence are now a constant presence in global politics. Academically, this is reflected in the work of various centres of genocide studies, such specialist journals as Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Journal of Genocide Research, and such books as Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale University Press, 2007), by the Australian historian Ben Kiernan. The Whitney Griswold professor of history, and director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, Kiernan purports to provide a comprehensive comparative study of the history of genocide. Because this is such an important topic it is disappointing that Blood and Soil doesn't deliver on its promise but is instead fatally compromised by prior ideological assumptions and commitments that vitiate its analysis and distort its historical accounts.

This failure is even more disappointing in the light of the book's core promise that such academic work can provide an early intervention capacity to prevent genocides:

   Genocides ... have much in common. Six hundred years of evidence
   helps us detect their essential elements not only in retrospect
   but, by analysis of common causes, potentially in advance, which
   increases the possibility of preventing future genocides with
   timely action.

As the reference to "us" suggests, it seems Kiernan imagines himself playing a role in any such pre-emptive, counter-genocide strategy. It is perhaps envisaged that potential genocides would be predicted by Kiernan and his colleagues and that intervention teams would be despatched to the problem area to operate under United Nations auspices in accordance with their analyses and directions.

Given such aspirations (which some might find frightening or fanciful) it is vital to explore the basic paradigm within which such scholars of genocide conduct their research, carry out their analyses and formulate their advice. Here, Blood and Soil provides a revealing case study.

Kiernan's main area of expertise is the history of Cambodia under the communist Khmer Rouge. He gained his PhD from Monash University (1983), worked at Australian universities and joined the Yale History Department in 1990 where he established the Cambodian Genocide Program (1994), and the Genocide Studies Program (1998). A member of the New Left and a supporter of the communist cause in South-East Asia, he visited Cambodia in 1975 after the Khmer Rouge takeover but initially rejected reports that they were implementing a systematic program of genocide, only shifting his position when the evidence became undeniable and communist Vietnam invaded Cambodia (Kampuchea) in 1978-79. He then became a fierce critic of the regime and subsequently wrote and edited several books on the topic.

In 1994 Kiernan's initial support for the Khmer Rouge attracted criticism from various quarters when he was awarded a grant to promote research into the regime. In particular, it was observed that Kiernan only become a strident critic after Hanoi publicly turned against the Khmer Rouge and it became respectable for those on the Left to finally acknowledge the genocidal nature of the regime, years after all objective commentators had done so.

Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that Blood and Soil promotes a revisionist history of genocide, shifting the analytical focus in the history of genocide away from the atavistic barbarity of Nazi Germany and the communist totalitarianism of the USSR, China and Cambodia, and onto the liberal democracies of England, America and Australia. As Clive James has recently reminded us, "for Stalin, liberal democracy was always the chief enemy, with Nazism coming a distant second". To achieve this aim, Kiernan inflates the concept of genocide into an omnibus category of historical, political and sociological analysis that becomes so broad as to be not only meaningless, but actually counter-productive and pernicious. In his hands genocide becomes a central and ubiquitous feature of modernity--an inherent dynamic akin to democratisation, modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation--whose frequency, he says, accelerated in the last third of the twentieth century in line with Western-led globalisation.

Indeed, Kiernan specifically indicts Western civilisation, claiming that genocide is intrinsic to it, with roots in the Classical age and the Judeo-Christian tradition, and he consequently finds its logic present in Renaissance humanism, Reformation Protestantism, Lockean liberalism, Enlightenment universalism, and, above all, in the agrarian policies of colonial and settler societies. As an approving review featured on the cover of the book strains to make clear, the origins of genocide lie not in the dynamics of Eurasian totalitarianism, but deep "within the bowels of the western tradition".

IN DEFLECTING ATTENTION away from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and other murderous regimes, and by making the English-speaking people central to his litany of atrocity, Kiernan is promoting the same revisionist perspective as that promoted by other academics, including many Australians (in something of a local cottage industry), in such works as Genocide and Settler Society (edited by A. Dirk Moses, Berghan Books, 2005), which claims, for example, that genocide is not contingent or accidental in liberal democracies, but is in fact "intrinsic to the deep structure of settler society", such as that found in America or Australia. Similarly, in an upcoming book, Empire, Colony, Genocide (edited by A. Dirk Moses, Berghan Books, 2008), the Australian literary historian John Docker asks pointedly, "Are Settler-Colonies Inherently Genocidal?"

To facilitate this revisionist shift in analytical focus, Kiernan claims that genocide has four principal components: a fetish for agriculture, cults of antiquity, ethnic enmity, and imperial and territorial conquests. It is notable that Kiernan provides no supporting argument for his selection of these particular four themes as opposed to others that would be obvious to anyone familiar with the history of genocide (for example, ultra-nationalism, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, the trauma of war and revolution, criminal dictatorship, state failure, the compromising of the judiciary, military, security and police forces, and the ready availability of cheap but murderous weaponry). Nor does he show how these four themes are articulated with the large-scale historical, economic, political, sociological and cultural structures and forces that have been central to the trajectory of modernity (such as the rise of the nation state, industrialisation, class struggle, modernisation, urbanisation, and demographic and climate change).

Instead, Kiernan argues that colonial and settler societies pioneered genocide, particularly in the early modern period in North America, Africa and Australia, and it was only in the early twentieth century that genocide became associated with what he calls "national chauvinist dictatorships" intent on territorial aggrandisement and the extermination of target populations. Instead of recognising that Nazism and communism were based on a new form of totalitarian state promoting mass mobilisation of the populace through the demonisation, victimisation and systematic extermination of race or class enemies, he insists that such regimes lie in ideological and historical continuity with liberal democratic societies and merely realised the totalitarian and genocidal tendencies allegedly present within them since the early modern era.

Consequently, while Kiernan recognises that technological and organisational innovations give contemporary genocidal regimes fearsome new capabilities, he insists that this merely enhances their capacity to implement prevailing genocidal ideologies on an industrial scale without requiring any innovation or producing any break with the earlier agrarian versions practised by settler societies. Similarly, while Kiernan concedes that Nazism and communism were driven by notions of scientific racism or class warfare, along with other factors that he excludes from his model of genocide, he concludes from this that these regimes are merely exceptions that prove the rule of his analysis rather than themselves being epoch-defining historical phenomena that disprove and invalidate his entire approach to the history of genocide. In other words, Kiernan tendentiously claims that genocide is intrinsic to Western civilisation as exemplified by the English-speaking peoples, and that the shift from settler societies to totalitarian societies in the twentieth century involves only a quantitative, not qualitative change.

Kiernan's strategy finds expression in what many may regard as the odd organisation of the book, which greatly emphasises alleged genocides carried out by England, its colonies, and their descendent societies, while radically downplaying undoubted genocides carried out by various revolutionary and totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. For example, the book has three parts: genocide in the period of early imperial expansion (including the Classical age) is given 122 pages; alleged genocide under "settler colonialism" (for example, the English in Ireland, North America, Australia and Africa) is given 228 pages; but the many horrendous twentieth-century genocides are allocated only 178 pages in total.

Within this overall structure, the alleged genocidal activities of Australia preposterously get more attention than any other nation or region, being allocated 61 pages, compared with the Armenian genocide (21 pages), the Nazi Holocaust (39 pages), the Japanese massacres in East Asia (31 pages), the Soviet Terror (28 pages), China under Mao (27 pages), and the atrocities of Cambodia and Rwanda (32 pages). In this manner, Kiernan makes the role of Australia in the history of genocide appear more than twice as significant as those in the Soviet Union and Communist China; and much more significant than even the Holocaust. The allegedly genocidal regimes of the settler colonies of the English in Ireland (54 pages), and the United States (54 pages) get similar disproportionate treatment.

These distortions multiply when we enquire further and find that the alleged genocidal acts in Australia, Ireland and America involve only comparatively very small numbers of casualties in various unco-ordinated and ambiguous incidents and small-scale conflicts occurring intermittently over extended periods of time. However tragic this may be, such events were frequently provoked or accompanied by significant attacks on settlers, and certainly never even remotely approached the scale of the deliberate genocidal campaigns involving millions of innocent, harmless and unarmed victims eliminated in specifically designed systems of mass extermination, implemented over short periods of time under the murderous regimes of the Nazis and others.

For example, Kiernan spends ten pages on the alleged "Genocidal Massacre on the Bathurst Plains", which turns out to be an account of the efforts of the British government and the settlers to develop agriculture in the area while trying to minimise conflict with the sparse Aboriginal population (some 600 to 700, according to Kiernan's figures). "The blacks" (as Kiernan refers to them) killed several whites and livestock and the situation deteriorated. A series of incidents involving the deaths of small numbers of blacks and colonists occurred and then a band of Aborigines "hit back hard", killing seven stockmen, "burning the huts and destroying the sheep and cattle" and "killing a great number of shepherds and stockmen".

Kiernan recognises that steps were taken to punish the whites involved, and he notes the protests published in the Sydney Gazette against Aboriginal deaths, along with calls to confront the blacks and drive them away. Then, on the basis of this account, he summarily declares that "conflict over land use had turned to genocidal massacre", and goes on to describe subsequent conflicts involving troops, which he claims eventually involved the deaths of perhaps several hundred Aborigines (and some twenty-two whites). Although some 400 blacks survived in the affected area (that is, the majority of the tribes concerned, according to Kiernan's figures) and the government had clearly not set out to commit genocide and sought to limit the conflict, as Kiernan himself concedes, he nevertheless concludes that this series of deadly but comparatively minor incidents constituted genocide.

This account may be compared to the account of the Holocaust offered by Kiernan. This, of course, involved the systematic extermination of some 6 million Jewish people in an unambiguous and undeniable act of genocide, along with millions of Poles, Russians and other groups. Despite the vast difference in scale, and the clear and explicit genocidal intent of the Nazis, Kiernan allocates the same space to this event as he does to the highly ambiguous activities on the Bathurst Plains and categorises both events as genocides.

IN DEVELOPING HIS ARGUMENT in this manner, Kiernan exploits the very general definition of genocide provided by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, modifying it where it suits him. Apart from this looseness, this convention has some other serious problems. For example, it is important to note that Stalin at the time insisted on the exclusion of any reference in the convention to the genocidal destruction of political groups, limiting genocide to acts carried out against only national, ethnic, racial and religious groups. This reflected a concern to shield from criticism Soviet policy towards the 5 million "richer" Russian peasants, the kulaks, and Stalin's infamous declaration in 1929 that the Soviet dictatorship must "Liquidate the kulaks as a class", which he proceeded to do. It says a lot about the integrity and legitimacy of the UN convention that Stalin's move to exclude political groups from consideration as victims of genocide was accepted.

In addition to this convention on genocide, Kiernan also adopts a cognate term, "genocidal massacres", which he specifically acknowledges is not contained in the 1948 convention, but which refers to "shorter, limited episodes of killing directed at a specific local or regional community, targeted because of its membership in a larger group". This move makes it possible for him to include in his indictments of settler societies many events that would otherwise not be discussed in any history of genocide. In his chapter on Australia this means, as we have seen, that he can repeatedly deploy the adjective genocidal in referring to various smallscale violent encounters between settlers, soldiers and Aborigines, even though these have none of the characteristics of genocide as it has previously been understood or even as it is defined under the UN convention. This adjective ultimately infests the book, successfully conveying the impression that the entire history of the West, and particularly the English-speaking peoples, has been one long genocidal rampage across the globe, with the Holocaust committed by the Nazis being an exceptional rather than the archetypal genocidal event.

In the case of Australia, the use of this circumlocution means that Kiernan can concede that "most Aborigines perished from new diseases [and] mass death from unwittingly introduced diseases is not genocide", but nevertheless still make constant reference to "genocidal massacres" in a manner clearly designed to conflate the difference between the two concepts and convey the impression that Australia was founded and developed through genocide.

He persists with this stratagem despite citing many instances where colonial administrators explicitly called for the lives of the Aborigines to be respected. For example, he cites the British government's statement to Cook in 1768 that "shedding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature"; and another government directive that they were to be treated with "amity and kindness". Nevertheless he still concludes that the result of the English settlement of Australia was "genocidal for many Aboriginal groups, in part or in whole" (page 252; emphasis added), in a fashion that threatens to make the term completely meaningless. Clearly, Kiernan knows that use of the noun genocide is not tenable, and instead relies on the adjective genocidal to do the dirty work.

KIERNAN'S GOAL of transforming the concept of genocide into a means of indicting liberal democracies becomes even clearer when we examine more closely the four themes that Kiernan claims constitute the genocidal ideology that has shaped modernity: a fetish for agriculture, cults of antiquity, ethnic enmity, and imperial and territorial conquests, or as Kiernan more vividly puts it, "the virulent mix of violence with ethnic or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and the idealization of cultivation".

As we have discussed, it seems that the rationale for Kiernan's selection of themes arises from his desire to make settler societies the prototype for all subsequent genocidal regimes. This is clear from Kiernan's discussion of his fourth theme, involving the desire for imperial and territorial conquests, which can be dealt with readily as it covers familiar ground in the history of genocide. It appears that Kiernan feels quite comfortable including it in his revisionist approach because it fits nicely with his condemnation of settler societies and their agrarianism. It means that he can assimilate the British colonisation of America and Australia to the imperialist programs of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Communist China and fascist Japan. For example, Kiernan sees such colonisation as equivalent to the Nazi conquest and ethnic cleansing of Poland, the Ukraine, and Western Russia--the essential defining link between the British and the Nazis, according to Kiernan, being a cultish devotion to both agricultural cultivation and antiquity.

The alleged fetish for agriculture, which is Kiernan's primary theme, refers to the way in which the increasingly intensive and highly productive farming of land came to be considered superior to traditional huntergathering and pastoral herding, and (he claims) came to be expressed in terms of genocidal animosity towards non-agriculturalists. He traces this "settler fetish for cultivation" from the "Spanish colonizers of the New World to their English contemporaries to the Nazis in the twentieth century and Al-Qaeda in the twenty-first", claiming that "throughout the early modern and modern eras, agricultural metaphors have easily expressed mass murder of target populations".

Here, one of two things seems to be happening: either Kiernan is implicitly condemning every society that develops beyond the level of a subsistence existence, apparently unconcerned that the capacity to generate an increasing economic surplus from agricultural development is the basis of civilisations across the planet; or he is condemning only such societies that, once developed, came to be involved in colonialism and territorial expansion in the modern era that led to the dispossession of indigenous peoples, effectively indicting all Western societies.

In either case, a number of problems immediately arise. First, Kiernan's approach seems to assume that there was some primordial state of nature that conferred proprietorship over various lands to the peoples that happened to be physically located in their vicinity at the time, simply on the basis of that fact alone, and that this was inviolable, both morally and otherwise. This displays a deep ignorance of the history of the concept of property, which evolved profoundly from Roman times, down through the Feudal period, and into the Modern Age, where it is a key component of liberal democracies and global commerce.

Second, he obviously ignores the unceasing movement of humans around the globe and the various demo graphic pressures, catastrophes and revolutions that have driven these movements since time immemorial, repeatedly involving the dislocation and frequent decimation of peoples. For example, while he repeatedly indicts Rome for its destruction of Carthage (apparently the genocidal "original sin", for Kiernan), he ignores the centuries of actual and threatened invasion from the nomadic Goths, Vandals, Alans, Lombards, Huns and other dislocated peoples that were on the move on a vast scale along Rome's borders and ultimately achieved its destruction, retarding the growth of civilisation in the West by hundreds of years.

A PRIMARY EXAMPLE of Kiernan's Romantic valorisation of the nomadic, hunter-gatherer state of nature is his account of the indigenous people of Australia, who, according to Kiernan, came to be called "Aborigines" primarily because of their pastoral, non-agricultural economy. Europeans, he claims, deplored the absence of cultivation and the wasted potential of the land and other natural resources, and this "prejudice" resulted in genocide: "Killings could occur with impunity in an ideological atmosphere that mixed expansionism, racism, and classical models with a fetish for cultivation and contempt for indigenous land use."

To illustrate this allegedly protogenocidal attitude, Kiernan cites the ( Sydney Herald's claim in 1838 that only labour invested in land could produce legitimate claims to proprietorship, and because the Aborigines had "bestowed no labour upon the land--their ownership, their right, was nothing more than that of an Emu or a Kangaroo" who also simply ate what they found upon the land. He also cites George Arthur's doubts that "a migratory savage tribe, consisting of 30 to 40 individuals roaming over an almost unlimited extent of country could acquire ... a property in the soil". Condemning such arguments, Kiernan insists that "the cult of cultivation acknowledged no alternative land use" to systematic agriculture and that genocidal machinery was therefore put in place in Tasmania and elsewhere to accomplish the extermination of the indigenous people.

Two points need to be made here. First, Kiernan's discussion of the situation in Tasmania is highly contentious, as he chooses to adhere to the historical orthodoxy that reigned before it was systematically discredited by Keith Windschuttle in The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume 1: Van Diemen's Land, 1803-47. Kiernan chooses not to engage constructively with Windschuttle's critique, preferring simply to accept the older and now untenable accounts because they facilitate his own argument. Perhaps to enhance the credibility of this evasive and obscurantist approach he clutters the relevant chapter with 352 endnotes (compared to the mere 162 required to sustain the case against the Nazis and the 119 needed to document the Soviet Red Terror). These are apparently provided to enhance the impression of scholarship and drive home his charge of genocide against the settler society of Van Diemen's Land.

The second issue that arises concerns the respective roles of nature, labour, property and wealth creation to which the Sydney Herald and Arthur alluded. Recognition of the importance of these factors was central to the development of liberal societies, as was recognised, for example, by John Locke, according to whom any person is free to mix their labour with the natural resources of the commonwealth in order to realise and exploit their inherent value and make the resulting product their private property. To counter such arguments in the case of the colonisation of Australia, Kiernan unconvincingly claims that the Aborigines "fanned with fire ... to stimulate the growth of food plants, like daisy yams", and therefore had proprietorship over the land. Kiernan similarly cites Adam Smith's analysis of farming and Smith's conclusion that "no equal capital puts into motion a greater quantity of productive labour than does that of the farmer". However, he cites Smith not to emphasise the production efficiencies and potential for wealth creation inherent in systematic agriculture, but merely as an example of what he sees as a purely ideological and "cultish" concern with agrarianism that allegedly led to genocidal attacks on nomadic and pastoral peoples.

It is notable in his valorisation of nomadic pastoralism and condemnation of agrarianism that Kiernan explicitly excludes discussion of the Mongol depredations that swept through Eurasia in the thirteenth century in one of the most important periods of genocide in recorded history, merely remarking that "the Mongols' slaughter of the inhabitants of Baghdad in 1258 ... deserves more attention". In a manner diametrically opposed to Kiernan's basic thesis, these nomadic pastoralists specifically targeted urban populations for extermination: "The Mongols came as a horde of fierce and barbarian warriors, prepared to treat their human victims as they treated animals rounded up in their annual great hunts: domesticating or slaughtering them as circumstances dictate" (William McNeill, The Rise of the West). In fact, even the decimation of Baghdad was only a comparatively minor example of the Mongols' genocidal strategy that came close to engulfing the entire Eurasian landmass and profoundly affected much of subsequent global history.

The reason that Kiernan avoids any discussion of such epoch-shaping events is because they cannot be accommodated within his own very particular theory of genocide, with its four idiosyncratic themes. While these may be found to varying degrees among the "settler societies" that Kiernan tendentiously wishes to indict for genocide, they are not necessarily present in the clearly genocidal societies he chooses to ignore.

In this fashion, Kiernan's desire to implicate "settler societies" in genocide requires him explicitly to ignore the most important genocidal campaigns that convulsed Eurasia during the half-millennium after the year 1000. While nomadic pastoralist societies had historically opposed agricultural societies and the urban civilisations that they helped support, in the thirteenth century they achieved an unprecedented strength on the Eurasian steppes and overwhelmed even the great civilisations of China and Islam, with their highly developed urban centres. Terror and mass extermination of all opposition was the principal Mongol military strategy, and urban centres were especially targeted to be sacked and totally destroyed. As Marshall Hodgson wrote in The Venture of Islam (1974):

   Again and again, almost the entire populace of a
   city was massacred without regard to sex or age ...
   With the population dead, the buildings would
   be levelled to the ground ... The terror was
   unprecedented [and] this was the primary purpose
   of the ferocity, which the Mongols exploited with
   high adeptness at psychological warfare ... But it
   expressed high emotions also ...

--specifically the Mongol hatred of city dwellers. This genocidal anti-urban ideology propelled the ravages of the pastoralist Mongols throughout this crucial period.

In fact, the sack of Baghdad that Kiernan passes over was a prime example of an anti-urban, ethnic, religious and cultural genocide, and it was carried out on a mass scale that had ramifications that remain important today, exactly 750 years later. Baghdad was one of the most famous and brilliant intellectual centres in the world, and was also the capital of the Abbasid caliphate, which had lasted for over 500 years and had great symbolic significance. Then in 1258 it was besieged, captured, looted, sacked, burned, and much of its population exterminated, with deaths estimated at between 200,000 and a million, a death toll so vast that the Mongol camp was forced to move upwind from the city to avoid the suffocating stench of decomposing bodies.

In accordance with their anti-urban and genocidal ideology, the nomadic Mongols destroyed all significant buildings, including palaces, mosques, public buildings and hospitals. The Tigris ran black from the ink as the Mongols dumped the collection of the great library of Baghdad into the river. The "House of Wisdom" had been established around 820, and innumerable priceless and irreplaceable books, documents and works on many subjects were obliterated from human history.

The canal and irrigation system that had sustained Mesopotamia for millennia was also destroyed and never repaired by a population that had either been exterminated or driven into the wilderness. Baghdad remained a ruined and depopulated city for centuries and never returned to its former glory. Moreover, because the Caliph had declared the city under the protection of Allah, its utter destruction was an enormous psychological and intellectual blow from which Islam has never fully recovered.

The genocidal campaigns of the Mongols also engulfed Russia, bringing "wholesale devastation and ... complete extermination" to many towns, notably Kiev, as an eyewitness recounts:

   They went against Russia and enacted a great
   massacre in the Russian land, they destroyed towns
   and fortresses and killed people, they besieged
   Kiev, which had been the capital of Russia, and
   after a long siege they took it and killed the
   inhabitants of the city; for this reason, when we
   passed through that land, we found lying in the field
   countless heads and bones of dead people; for this
   city had been extremely large and very populous,
   whereas now it has been reduced to nothing.

   (Nicholas Riasanovsky, History of Russia)

The Mongol onslaught and subsequent occupation deprived the indigenous Russian people of the best land and caused a shift of the population, economic activity and political power to the north-east, largely cutting Russia off from both Byzantium and the West, and especially from such epochal developments as the Renaissance and the Reformation. Instead, life became a desperate struggle for survival, and the sophisticated Kievan culture went into rapid decline. Overall, says Riasanovsky, "historians have estimated that the Mongol invasion and domination of Russia retarded the development of the country by some 150 or 200 years".

A similar fate befell Hungary. As Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries report in A History of Eastern Europe:

   it was devastatingly invaded by Mongol marauders
   in 1241 and 1242 ... In order to terrorize the
   population, large numbers of defenceless civilians
   were massacred, while others were carried off as
   slaves. Many of those who sought refuge in the
   forests, marshes or highlands died of hunger and
   disease.

As with Russia, this demographic catastrophe fundamentally changed the direction of Hungarian history.

The Mongols also initiated the greatest act of clearly intentional genocide in recorded history in 1347 when the Mongol army was besieging the Genoese trading centre of Kaffa on the Crimean peninsula. Finding their own forces decimated by a fearsome plague, the Mongols decided to use their infected corpses as biological weapons, catapulting them over the city walls to infect and exterminate the urban inhabitants. When the Genoese traders fled by sea, they carried the plague to Sicily and Italy and from there the Black Death engulfed Europe, killing an estimated 20 to 30 million people by 1351, about half the population. This genocidal catastrophe initiated by the Mongols triggered a series of economic, social, cultural and political events that transformed Europe.

(The deliberate use by the Mongols of infected corpses to promote infection may be contrasted to the epidemiological catastrophe that engulfed the Americas after the arrival of the Europeans. Despite the similar death toll, even Kiernan concedes that the "Spaniards did not deliberately spread these diseases".)

As this excursus illustrates, Kiernan's claim that the roots of genocide lie within agrarianism and its allegedly genocidal attitude towards nomadic pastoralists is both excessive and misleading. Moreover, his desire to locate settler societies at the centre of the history of genocide and to elevate frontier skirmishes to the status of "genocidal massacres" leads him not only to ignore massive historical counter-examples that contradict his argument, but also to present a seriously distorted view of history.

THE SECOND CORE THEME of Kiernan's model of genocide is what he calls the cult of antiquity: "Like racism, cults of antiquity ... fit snugly into an ideal agrarian landscape". In Kiernan's account, genocide and a cultish attachment to antiquity are intrinsic to modernity: "the modern era and modern genocide both began with a revival of interest in the ancient world" that emerged out of Renaissance humanism and its enthusiasm for the great authors and texts of classical antiquity. For example:

   English expansionists linked classical accounts of
   the triumphs of Rome and the disappearance of
   Carthage to re-emerging agrarian preconceptions of
   rural morality and fruitful land use ... The Roman
   military model combined with the new agrarian
   ideology to launch English colonizers on a voyage
   to empire ... Antiquity, conquest, agriculture, and
   genocidal massacre became inextricably linked.

In Australia, according to Kiernan, this "cult" was used to justify the dispossession of the Aborigines, with ancient Rome being cited in the early nineteenth century as a model of the civilising mission being undertaken by the English in Tasmania, while Sydney was seen as Troy and Melbourne as Athens or Rome: "In Australia, as earlier in America, models of ancient conquest and agrarian cultivation justified territorial expansion, racism, and in some situations, extermination or genocidal acts."

In addition to "inscribing a purportedly ancient model on someone else's land" (owned apparently, in the case cited above, because someone set fire to it to encourage the yams), these cults of antiquity allegedly express other allegedly sinister aims. These include: combating perceived societal or civilisational decline, instituting or restoring utopias, eradicating contamination, restoring purity and order to society, and providing "genocidists [sic] with political models that span millennia and link continents". Under the influence of such cults, agricultural cultivation, Kiernan's bete noire, "became a symbol or modern incarnation of lost ancient power".

Kiernan doesn't just reduce the Renaissance discovery of the Classical world of Greece and Rome to a genocidal "cult of antiquity", he also assimilates it to the Nazis' mythologisation of the Aryan, Teutonic and German past; the call by Japan's Meiji Restorationists for a return to the purity of primordial Japanese culture before its "corruption" by Buddhist and Sinic influences; Pol Pot's similar exultation of the "original culture" of ancient Khmer; and even al Qaeda's "preoccupation with the 'defence of the Prophet's tradition', [which] echoed the cults of antiquity of other genocidists". It is striking that a professor of history at one of the world's great universities is comfortable reducing the 500-year history of Western humanism to the status of a genocidal cult.

FINALLY, we turn to the third of Kiernan's themes, "ethnic enmity". It is notable that Kiernan chooses such a bland and generalised phrase to refer to such horrendous phenomena as virulent anti-Semitism and murderous racial hatred. Indeed, such generalised terminology seems to have been chosen deliberately to de-emphasise and obscure the massive role actually played in genocide by these widely recognised factors compared to the minor or inconsequential roles played by the themes that Kiernan tendentiously wants to emphasise in his revisionist account. In this way, the unjustified and inordinate emphasis that he places on "the fetish for agriculture" and "the cult of antiquity" as key components of genocide is not highlighted by comparison with the indubitably central features of genocide and seen for the tendentious exercise in revisionism that it is.

The results of this stratagem are best illustrated in Kiernan's comparatively short and superficial chapter on Germany and Nazi genocide. This discusses a range of issues relating to his preferred themes before turning to Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in a section that also discusses Nazi attitudes towards the Poles. Consequently, while Kiernan includes a discussion of the Holocaust because he can't avoid doing so, his specific treatment of it occupies only about eleven pages of a 724-page book on the history of genocide.

This amazingly cursory treatment of the Holocaust is made even more peculiar by Kiernan's acknowledgment on page 454 that it was "history's most extreme case of genocide". In fact, it appears to be this very uniqueness that causes Kiernan to limit his discussion of it, as he says: the Holocaust was "clearly unique in several ways. A state-sponsored attempt at total extermination by industrialized murder of unnamed millions has no parallel before or since". It was also directed primarily against the Jewish people, who the Nazis saw as "archetypal urbanites", not indigenous, nomadic pastoralists. In fact, it was precisely the "cosmopolitan" status of the Jewish people that compromised the Nazi vision of a "pure Aryan" society and made them the focus of Nazi hatred, and also made it feasible to associate them with the "internationalist" aspirations of the Bolshevik regime in the Soviet Union as part of a global conspiracy that still resonates amongst various extremists today. The reality of the Holocaust therefore largely stands outside and resists Kiernan's generalised model of genocide. This model is derived not from the concrete history of the twentieth century but rather from his highly negative view of settler societies and their agrarianism; is both global and trans-historical in its analytical reach; seeks to gather innumerable wars, conflicts and massacres into its analytical net; and therefore cannot be allowed by Kiernan to be constrained in its all-encompassing application by the singularity of a truly massive event like the Holocaust.

Consequently, while the Holocaust cannot be ignored or explicitly excluded by Kiernan from his book, it emerges as some sort of atypical "extreme" genocide that has to be treated separately from the other more "normal" forms, represented by the alleged depredations of settler societies and others driven by agrarianism and cults of antiquity. The alternative, that Kiernan should recognise that the Holocaust should be retained at the centre of all analyses of genocide, means that he would have to jettison the absurdly broad definition of genocide that he has employed, along with his untenable model based on his four arbitrarily chosen themes, and start again.

Kiernan concludes his book with the claim that "the cure and prevention of the crime of genocide must lie, at least in part, in the diagnosis of its recurring causes and symptoms", thus providing a mandate for his form of comparative history and international intervention in pre-genocidal hot-spots. To the extent that this may be viable or desirable, it makes it all the more vital that such a diagnosis is correct, takes account of the relevant historical and theoretical factors that have been systematically identified over sixty years of scholarship, and doesn't fall victim to misleading ideological predispositions and commitments.

Unfortunately, not only does Kiernan fall into this trap but he also compounds the problem by constructing an elaborate piece of historical revisionism that has the potential to fundamentally mislead unsuspecting people, especially political and community figures, academics, teachers and students, for whom this book may become a standard text on the history of genocide. In this sense, Blood and Soil is reminiscent of another revisionist work, Orientalism by Edward Said, which also generalised and radicalised a previously useful and neutral descriptive category to provide the basis of a wide-ranging and equally tendentious attack on Western civilisation. This became one of the most debilitating and destructive interventions in contemporary scholarship. Consequently, Blood and Soil is more likely to increase rather than decrease the danger of future genocides, as it denigrates and disregards precisely those characteristics of liberal democratic societies that offer the best protection against the exploitation of the various factors that make genocide possible.

Mervyn F. Bendle is Senior Lecturer in History and Communications at James Cook University.