Philip G. Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan,eds,Theatres of Violence: Massacre,Mass Killing and Atrocity Throughout History

Reviewed by: Uğur Ümit Üngör, NIOD: Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Netherlands

Dwyer and Ryan have edited an admirable and varied collection of 20 chapters on the phenomenon of massacre. The cases cover the Greek and Roman eras, medieval Europe, settler colonialist violence against indigenous groups, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Afghanistan. These chapters are organized in four chronological parts covering the ancient world, the colonial frontier, the modern era and chapters on memory and narrative.

The editors theorize the concept in the introduction and argue that massacre is a legitimate research topic in itself, generally overshadowed by the study of genocide. The distinction between massacre and genocide is that of event and incident versus process and policy. Whereas massacres are limited in time and confined in space, genocides are extended and sustained processes consisting of a series of massacres. Dwyer and Ryan argue that ‘the tendency to cover up a massacre or mass killing is a relatively recent phenomenon’ (xix). This confirms recent studies by Steven Pinker and Darius Rejali which argue that it is not political violence that has increased globally, but our sensitivity to it.

The density of the volume is such that this review cannot do full justice to the quality of the contributions. Still, several chapters stood out for their originality and argumentation. Laurence Marvin nuances the widespread belief that the Middle Ages were an epoch synonymous with brutality, atrocity and massacre. Marvin convincingly argues that knights and civilians did differentiate between just and unjust violence, concluding that the potential for massacre and atrocity increased on shifting political, cultural and religious frontiers and boundaries. Benjamin Madley’s chapter cleverly compares massacres against Tasmanians and Native Americans in the late nineteenth century. He identifies instructive similarities: both massacre tactics employed surprise, encirclement, attempts to make engagements as asymmetric as possible, nocturnal reconnaissance and dehumanization. Most importantly, the perpetrators ignored jus in bello norms for indigenous groups, effectively committing crimes against humanity against unarmed civilians and disarmed soldiers. Dwyer’s chapter on Napoleonic warfare reminds us that the Napoleonic wars consisted of many massacres, mutilation, cannibalism, mass rape – all of which were reported in combatants’ memoirs and letters. Dwyer analyses the logic of these acts and concludes that they were by no means atavistic aberrations, but served clear strategic purposes that were later justified by veterans.

The chapters written by François-Xavier Nérard and Claudia Weber on Stalin’s massacres emphasize the secrecy that surrounds state-orchestrated mass violence. Weber’s chapter on the 1940 massacre of Polish elites in the Katyn forests offers a fascinating insight into how and why a perpetrator regime committed a huge massacre and got away with it. She demonstrates that considerations of Realpolitik were at the foundation of the Allied co-denial of the massacre. Nérard examines the emergence (literally, from thawing rivers) and re-discovery of mass graves in post-Soviet Russia. He suggests that the Russian government’s historical manipulations generate ignorance and silence concerning these sites among the public.

One of the most lucid contributions is Annie Pohlman’s thoroughly researched study of the 1965–66 Indonesian massacres. Pohlman has conducted extensive interviews with female survivors of that understudied genocide and argues that the killings were often public, performative acts in which the embodied victim community served as a stage on which a murderous play was performed. The very act of killing then served as a retroactive legitimization of itself: the victim was killed; therefore he/she must have been a Communist. (This is illustrated best in Joshua Oppenheimer’s riveting documentary, The Act of Killing, in which aged Indonesian perpetrators justify their murders.) Psychologists call this the ‘just world myth’, which postulates that bad things happen only to those who somehow bring on or deserve the consequences of their acts. Intentions are restructured and adjusted to the outcomes.

Two questions remain relatively understudied in this book and the research field in general. First of all, what is the logic of massacres? Do they, as some contributors claim, serve a clear political purpose? Or are they predictable consequences of the whims the perpetrators? For answers to these questions, we must turn to social science analyses of the micro-foundations of civil wars. Second, what is the relationship between massacre and genocide? Genocide can be defined as a complex policy of systematic massacre and annihilation of a group of civilians. We need studies of how an accumulation of massacres can morph into either a civil war including strings of tit-for-tat retributions (as in the Lebanese or Colombian civil wars), or a one-sided pattern of genocide (as in the Armenian or Rwandan genocide). In any case, the book’s publication could not have been more timely. From the spring of 2012 on, the Assad regime has carried out several horrific massacres against civilians as an increasingly routine policy. The insights garnered in this book can elucidate the mad logic of massacres in Syria and beyond.