Abstract
Lawyers have a variety of different names and theoretical frameworks for mass killings of the sort analyzed in Jonathan Leader-Maynard’s book. However, whether they talk about genocide, crimes against humanity, or a violation of the right to life, lawyers are always referring to actions that depend on an ideological framework that convinces people to abandon their instinctive aversion to intentionally killing other human beings. That is because to commit a mass killing, a perpetrator coalition has to be assembled, and that coalition is held together with a common ideological framework. In Ideology and Mass Killings, Leader-Maynard argues there is a single hardline ideology that drives mass killing: security. He argues this ideology drives mass killing perpetrated by professional military and mass killing perpetuated by non-professional military groups, such as militias or activists from political parties.
When ideology is analyzed, there is tendency to use it as a proxy for discussions about competing future utopias. The fact that ideologies just as often explain how groups of people, often very scared and desperate, interpret facts in the present is often overlooked. Some people in a perpetrator coalition may have an ideological utopic belief about the future (think a Nazi SS leader with dreams of the greater Reich), but in such a coalition these people are bound together with lots of ordinary people, non-hardliners, concerned about the personal security of their families and broader group (think a Wehrmacht conscript solider). In Ideology and Mass Killing, Leader-Maynard emphasizes that ideologies are stable frameworks that hold different groups together. These frameworks may take time to work though and a perpetrator coalition is, Leader-Maynard claims, “the culmination of a process of ideological radicalization stretching back years” (72).
According to Leader-Maynard, a hardline security ideology helps construct security threats and offers a set of explanations about these threats to a perpetrator coalition, shaping the coalition’s view of the world. Interviews of Nazi supporters in the Netherlands cited in Chapter 4 of the book show how the Nazis often identified themselves as would-be victims, needing to protect their “ontologogical security and that of their community against Jewish threats” (72). These ontological frameworks facilitated the construction of justificatory narratives, which helped with the attribution of guilt to the victims of the mass killing and their disidentification as human beings.
Perhaps the most interesting component of the justificatory aspects of ideology is the construction of a future, usually a near future, where violence will definitely occur or become inevitable. This future rationalizes mass killing in the present as a quasi-defensive measure. A vision of the future is at work in the perpetrator’s mind, but that vision of the future is shaped by a security ideology and is reflected in anxiety about personal security or the security of family in the immediate future, rather than by a promise of a utopia with rewards in the distant future.
In Chapter 8, Leader-Maynard offers an extensive case study of the 1994 Rwandan genocide to substantiate this argument. Prior to the genocide, the Hutus were identified as an ethnic community and Hutu elites were radicalized. Leader-Maynard shows how escalating security concerns were shaped by the idea that “a fundamentally separate group to which Hutu owed lesser if any obligations” was engaging in “terrible machinations against the Hutu majority” (283). The case study is compelling but Leader-Maynard misses the opportunity to show how his theoretical conclusions play themselves out in practice in other contexts as well.
He could have considered, for example, how his theories can be identified at work in International Criminal Court (ICC) cases, such as the decision in Prosecutor v Bosco-Natanga No. ICC-01/04-02/06 (Trial Chamber, Judgment 8 July, 2019). In this case the ICC recognized the role an ideological framework plays in mass killing to exacerbate the perpetrator coalition’s fear of the victim. The Court found it “was pursuant to the organisational policy of the armed group” that “plans for genocide or control of the territory by a competing ethnic group were recurrent fears” (Bosco-Natanga para 683). These fears were reinforced in training camps by both formal instruction and by informal means, such as singing songs which encouraged fear of other ethnic groups and glamorized killing them (Bosco-Natanga para 373). In general, the wider practical application of the theories discussed in this book in international criminal law would be a rich agenda for future research.
Throughout the book the broader question of responsibility, in both its legal and moral sense, is one Leader-Maynard doesn’t explore fully. For example, in a chapter on Stalinist repression there is an excellent account of the importance of security narratives in the justification of mass killing. In this case, mass killing was justified by narratives that developed the idea of sabotage from within from counter-revolutionary forces. The book does not discuss in much detail who was responsible for maintaining and promoting these narratives and to what extent people were simultaneously participants in and subjects to the perpetuation of a security ideology. In a real sense, some in the perpetrator coalition were themselves notional “victims” of ideological indoctrination even while they were also actual perpetrators or accomplices to mass killing.
This does not however take away from one of the highlights of the book, which is the intense level of detail in the case studies. Clear theoretical frameworks are set out in earlier chapters and then demonstrated in action in each one of the cases discussed. This structure and attention to detail makes what could be a particularly controversial case study in chapter 6 cogent and persuasive. That chapter describes allied area bombing in World War II as an instance of mass killing. Prior to the war, in Europe both elite and popular imagination was seized by the idea that mass areial bombing was devastating but also inevitable. When this bombing occurred in the early stages of the war, it was tactical, in support of ongoing military objectives. Civilians may have died but the bombing did not aim to kill civilians on mass. However, in 1942-1943 the British Royal Airforce (RAF) started carrying out an explicit policy of “area bombing” designed to kill civilians. It justified this policy with an explicit security reason; Air Marshall Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command claimed the mass destruction of cities would lead to German surrender within a year and surrender would ensure that the Luftwaffe would not be able to repeat the bombing of British cities that had occurred in 1940–41. Area bombing by the RAF led to the destriction of whole cities, leading in 1945, to what most contemporary historians consider a war crime—the fire-bombing of Dresden.
For anyone working on anything to do with war crimes, Ideology and Mass Killing is a must read. This fascinating book succeds in putting thinking about security into an ideological context. More importantly, it explains how ideological frameworks can take advantage of everyday fears and focus them through the lens of security to justify and enourage mass killing. Thus, ideology sows what it reaps—fear and mass killing perpetuated by individuals who are afraid for their lives.