Failure™ Magazine

Killing Is His Business

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

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History

Have you uncovered any reliable indicators for when a mass killing is imminent?
That’s a harder question. In part, the reason why it’s so hard to determine is because it’s possible for small groups to have such a great influence. Broad societal indicators are probably not going to be all that useful. In other words, if you look at a society and see there’s a lot of hatred between certain groups—lots of discrimination—that’s not necessarily indicative that violence on this scale is likely to break out. What matters is whether a small group of people with an interest in killing manages to come to power, adopting policies that might eventually lead them to consider violence on this level.

I always think it makes sense to look at the interests of those groups that are in power or near to power. If we see groups that are trying to bring about social transformation on a scale and pace of those transformations that we saw in communist societies we should be quite concerned about what might happen. Social engineering on that scale almost never succeeds. Usually it’s associated with a lot of intentional violence and dislocation that results in fatalities—starvation, malnutrition, etc. The second thing we should look for is attempts to carry out ethnic cleansing because a lot of times genocide emerges out of failed policies of ethnic cleansing. When one sees groups trying to move large populations of minority groups around or out of a country, one should be worried that those policies might eventually escalate beyond simply trying to move people around, which is in itself a violent process. Then the third thing—and the one kind of mass killing we haven’t discussed yet—is large-scale guerilla warfare. That’s another situation that provides incentives for leaders to consider violence against civilians on a massive scale. When we see states fighting very large, very popular guerilla insurgencies there’s always got to be a concern that the state will eventually begin to consider violence against civilians if conventional military methods are failing.

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