Failure™ Magazine

Killing Is His Business

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

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History

Why have communist regimes been responsible for the deadliest episodes?
They wanted to fundamentally reorganize society at the expense of the way of life of certain groups. People think about Hitler’s attacks as somehow being worse because they were directed at specific ethnic groups. But in terms of the total numbers, more people were killed in both China and the Soviet Union—possibly several times more—than Hitler killed, even if you include his non-Jewish victims. The reason why these regimes have been so violent is that they wanted to take control of people’s lives in ways that went far beyond what your typical dictator might want to do.

In all three cases I look at in the book—China, the Soviet Union and Cambodia—peasants made up 80 to 90 percent of the population. When most people think about violence in the Soviet Union they think of the Great Purges [in the 1930s], which of course were brutally violent, but far worse than that was the violence associated with collectivization. The same was true in China during the Great Leap Forward [1958-60] and in Cambodia. Basically, the violence occurred because all these peasants—millions upon millions of people, hundreds of millions in China and the Soviet Union—were asked to make extraordinary changes in their lives, give up the way they were growing food, and adopt untested methods. That results in death and dying for at least two reasons. When the communist cadre’s showed up and told these peasants what was expected of them—that they were supposed to move off the farm they had lived on all their lives and move to a collective farm, and grow food in ways the peasants thought was unwise—some of them resisted, both violently and non-violently. The response to that by those regimes was to kill people. The second reason—and the reason that actually takes more lives in both China and the Soviet Union than the actual violence—is that these new methods of agriculture were so poorly thought out that in both cases they resulted in the collapse of the food production system. The peasants bore the brunt of that and so huge waves of starvation occurred in both countries. Some estimate that the famine in China during the Great Leap Forward killed as many as 30 million people—the largest famine in history.

In “Final Solutions” you note mass killing is often described as “killing for killing’s sake.” But reading your descriptions it rarely seems that simplistic.
One of the major themes of the book is to try to understand why leaders consider violence like this. What struck me when I looked at these cases in some detail is how little it really looked like “killing for killing’s sake.” Instead, it appeared to be a means to an end. In other words, what the perpetrators really wanted was not the death of these victims, per se. They certainly didn’t care about those victims and didn’t lose much sleep over the fact that millions of them were killed. But that was not the end in itself. As I said, in the case of collectivization, they had to kill in order to implement this new system of economic organization. If they could have done that without killing so many people I think they would have.

In the case of the well-known ethnic genocides, you can often see genocide emerge when efforts to remove people from society fail. Killing is a way to get people out of society, even if in many cases it seems the perpetrators would have been content to let them go to some other country far away where they would no longer be considered a threat. If you believe it’s “killing for killing’s sake” then there’s not much the international community can do short of directly intervening to protect the victims. But if you believe the perpetrators might actually be willing to not kill if those victims could be relocated, then one has to look more harshly at the failure of the international community to consider accepting refugees from countries where this is going on.

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