Failure™ Magazine

Killing Is His Business

The Failure Interview: Benjamin A. Valentino, author of “Final Solutions.”

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History

Most people would be surprised at the long list of mass killings that took place in the twentieth century. So much for the post-Holocaust vow of “never again,” right?
Absolutely. Genocide has been far more common than people tend to realize. It has not just been Armenia, the Holocaust and Rwanda—the ones that come to most people’s mind. Even those who adhere to a much stricter definition of genocide usually include a considerably longer list than that. The broad definition of mass killing that I use is slightly different than the way most people use the term “genocide” [defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group”]. The primary difference is I count all cases of violence against civilians in which 50,000 or more people are killed in [a span of] five years. Most don’t use a numerical standard; they are interested in the effort to destroy a group as a whole. So they end up with a somewhat shorter list of cases. But there’s actually quite a bit of overlap—at least sixty or seventy percent. The ones that don’t overlap are examples on my list that killed huge numbers of people but where you might not say there was a coordinated effort to wipe out every man, woman and child. There are cases on other lists where the victim group was quite small, so it didn’t take that many people actually being killed for people to believe that there was a threat to the existence of the group.

Your work certainly highlights how poorly informed the public is about mass killings. Why does the subject receive so little media attention and—based on what you’ve said—relatively little scholarly attention?
That’s a question I don’t think I have a satisfactory answer for. Of course, everybody knows about the Holocaust, but what has become clear to me over time is that the Holocaust is unique in the way it has entered the American and international consciousness. It’s just so far better understood—even by scholars—than all these other cases, some of which have killed as many or possibly more people. It’s particularly puzzling why cases of mass killing by communist states don’t get more attention. One would expect that in the United States—a country that had a 50-year crusade against communism—we would be well aware of all the things communist countries did. But it’s still sort of kitschy to wear a T-shirt that says “CCCP” on it, or to wear a Chinese Red Star cap or something like that.

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