“Genocides: A World History” featuring Norman Naimark

acts intended to destroy in whole or in part a national ethnic racial or religious group as such with those words which passed to the general assembly in 1948 the united nations defined genocide yet genocide was not only an attribute or feature of the second world war as our guest argues today jennifer genocide represents an attribute throughout human history with us today an expert on this grim but to human subject norman neymark uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson a native of new york the historian norman neymark holds bachelor's masters and a doctorate degree from stanford dr neymark now serves as the robert and florence mcdonald professor of east european studies at stanford and he is also a fellow at the hoover institution and the institute of international studies both again at stanford dr neymark is the author of a number of books including stalin's genocides fires of hatred ethnic cleansing in the 20th century and his definitive work the russians in germany a history of the soviet zone of occupation 1945 to 1949. dr neymark's new book genocide a world history norman neymar welcome thank you peter nice to be here norman you and i are friends you are one of the loveliest and most persistently cheerful men that i know how did you come to devote such a large part of your career well i just read the titles of books of yours stalin's genocide ethnic cleansing fires of hatred ethnic cleansing and now this book genocide a world history how did the most cheerful man i know come to devote himself to the grimmest subject anyone could imagine well i mean there is a there is a story and i'll tell you the story and the story is that in the um 1990s beginning of the 1990s war and then ethnic cleansing broke out in the balkans and i had spent a couple of years a couple summers over a couple of years in the balkans among you know people uh in actually in southern herzegovina serbs cross muslims and others and i was on archaeological dicks then as a graduate student and this was early on by the way to redo the timing the timing was at the end of the 1960s beginning in the 70s i was in the balkans as a graduate student and it was a wonderful time and there were these were genuine multinational societies that operated um you know on the basis of acceptance and and acknowledgement and kind of mutual um that they operated to their mutual benefits so the the communism of tito was was kind of optional it wasn't a deep part of the system no it wasn't a deep part of the society by the end of the 70s and and the beginning i mean by the end of the 60s and beginning in the 70s and yugoslavia was actually the loosest of all the communists societies people could travel there very easily and people got along well it was a really you know i mean it wasn't a wealthy place but it was a place with a lot of good humor good food lots to drink good place to be a great student yeah it's a good place a great place to be a grad student and i enjoyed that very much so when the 90s came and the war came i i couldn't believe it you know i if someone had predicted that yugoslavia would fall apart you know an ethnic killing and ethnic animosities of the sort that happened families being torn apart friendships being torn apart a whole society was torn apart i was shocked and i wanted to get to the bottom of that story i mean a piece of this story is actually one of my professors too amanda wayne vusnich who also in his time was at hoover and in the history department um was a serb from from that region and i had gone with him originally in the late 60s to the balkans and he he loved this whole atmosphere you know and was part of it and himself considered himself a necessarily a serb or a crowd that sort of thing and he was torn apart by this he was already retired i had you know i had taken his place at stanford and um and just that the kind of tragedy of seeing a multi-ethnic society fall apart just got to me and then i thought about our own society and some of the strains in it and could that happen here and then i thought about some other incidents in history about which i had read but didn't study in any depth for example in nazi germany where the jews had been you know assimilated i mean these were not unassimilated people many of the people who actually went to the concentration camp as jews didn't even think of themselves as jews they thought of themselves as good germans as good germans and they weren't i mean they were they often were they often spoke the language knew the history had come up they often had converted right i mean they didn't even think of themselves as jews necessarily religiously and then you thought about other incidents as well the armenian genocide where armenians had lived in peace in the ottoman empire for a very long time and at the end of the 19th century this began to fall apart and then 1915 there was a horrible genocide so i put all this together and i said to myself what you know what's going on here and how does it happen and again in the back of your mind as we live in a profoundly multi-ethnic society right and and we do pretty damn well with it um so the question is you know is that in danger can that happen here and those kinds of questions then motivated me first of all then to write this book fires a hatred about ethnic cleansing and i kept sort of kept on this trail as it were i didn't feel like i really answered the question and i talked to a lot of my colleagues in soviet history you know i'm a soviet historian as well as an east european historian and then and more broadly i started talking to my colleagues in soviet history and i said to them you know what stalin did in the 30s in the soviet union sure looks like genocide to me they say no no no that's not genocide you know that's something different and that can't be considered genocide and i kept reading and i kept thinking i kept arguing with him and i thought to myself wait a minute something's wrong here right right and i decided then to write this book about stones genocides you know and i'm making the argument that what happened in the 30s you know this terrible mass killing was genocide and that's when i got into issues of the definition of genocide which you read at the beginning right right and that definition as you recall says nothing about social groups that says nothing about political groups it says nothing about other kinds of groups except for ethnic religious racial and national groups those are the four groups identified in the convention and i i thought to myself well wait a minute why did they just identify those groups and not other groups and i went back to the history of the convention and it turns out the convention itself is very political and that the soviets insisted that political and social groups there were others as well but the soviets said no way we're going to vote for a convention you know that can be turned on us and the americans essentially said okay you know we just we want a unanimous convention nobody was paying much attention to 1948 they were still trying to get along with oh yeah yeah and in this case i mean we're talking about a development by the way between 46 and 48 48 was the was the culmination right and so everybody just signed on with these four categories and they're thinking by the way they're thinking not about anything else really but what happened in the second world war yes when jews were killed when poles were killed when russians were killed and for their you know ethnic and national and religious uh um identities so you know that really convinced me then to you know go after this point and say well you know just because the soviets got this out of the convention doesn't mean we have to buy the convention just as it is i think it's a good convention i think the laws that have come out of it have been very positive but i think they made a mistake by not including other kinds of groups like for example culox right a group of a group of um supposedly rich farmers identified by stalin and then attacked he said i'm going to wipe them out and you wipe them out so after that i thought well that's enough of this genocide thing but then you know people asked me to talk various places about genocide and i'd get questions you know people raise their hands and they'd say well what about the american indians and i'd say well you know i don't i'm an historian of europe and russia and i don't know much about the united states or indians i can't what about this what about that and i kept saying to myself after this would happen you know i can't just say not my job not my job not not in my uh not in my portfolio so that's when i started teaching here you know a kind of world history and then i realized it's not just contemporary that's the other thing we have a kind of hubris about modernity i think sometimes that you know the only only things that really happen that are important happened in the modern period and everything before then is just not important right it's not us right so i did both things i went back in time and then um i expanded you know around the world and i started looking into you know australian history and into american history having to do with indians and native americans and thinking about genocide in broader terms and i realized you know of course there are differences over time and there are differences across time you know in the modern period between various genocides but the genocide is actually an incredibly you keep seeing it you keep seeing yeah you keep seeing it everywhere exactly and you and and you know even if you hold up bar high as i think you should about what genocide is because everybody in some senses wants their genocide even if you hold the bar high you find it everywhere and you and then you discover it out of nowhere meaning you know you'll find things you know that you've never even heard of and and all of a sudden you start reading about a people you know in patagonia in the 1880s you know the selknom people there was a piece in the new yorker you know i ran across it the last selkanam speakers a wonderful piece about a year ago and turns out there were about 400 000 of this you know native people in um in actually in tierra del fuego in the southern part of chile where uh you know they lived there in the 1880s gold was discovered you know farmers came in and they said you know we want this land and there were no more sulk numb 25 years later wow you know so these kinds of episodes happen over and over again and we just don't know much about them i mean let me be a student in your class and take you through if i may just raising my hand and asking questions some of the the structure of the book in a certain sense and let's begin with this question of definition you've just given us the background of the un's definition of genocide distinguished genocide from acts of war genocide doesn't just mean people killing other people right distinguish it okay so it's um i mean the the the convention really does this pretty well and then there's a subsequent yet there's a subsequent jurisprudence now which has helped us a lot understand this but first of all it's inten it's an intentional killing of a group of people as such so that means what you're trying to do is eliminate that group right so the obvious case again hitler and the jews is obvious actually the young turks and the armenians is also obvious they're after that group in a certain way stalin and the kulaks as i mentioned you identify a group and you kill a group war right you know you're killing each other in military combat the idea is not to eliminate that group i mean when we go to war with the nazis we don't say we're going to kill all germans no or we don't intend that at all we'd like the war to be over fast so so is it is it a fair as a kind of mental experiment thought experiment the test of genocide is is there anything a member of the identified group can do to escape it right and the answer is i think no that's right because a jew the nazis wanted to eliminate the jews because they were jews a jew could not say wait a moment i'll sign up to mine kampf i'll convert to christianity i'll become a good juror there was nothing a jew could do right okay whereas in war there is something the other side can do it can surrender that's right and then the fighting stops okay now can i also can may i also ask is there this is tricky material i think tricky territory for a professional historian but you being you you will have thought it through do you want to make it do you want to draw a sharp moral distinction genocide is always wrong in and of itself there's been something intrinsically repugnant and evil about it whereas there is such a thing as a just war we can argue about each instance but there is such a thing as self-defense you'll go for that that's exactly right okay exactly right i mean genocide has been identified in the jurisprudence there's some arguments by the way there are arguments about everything i mean do you understand that of course and historians love to argue and that's that's why we're in that business i think sometimes but but yes genocide is considered in the jurisprudence and i think by historians as well and there's a kind of meshing of jurisprudence in the historian in me when i do work like this um as the crime of crimes the worst crime you can commit you know worse than crimes against humanity which can be horrible worse than uh war crimes which can also be horrible and even numbers can be more you know in some other kinds of crimes but this business of trying to eliminate you know the fundamental groups of people as group of people right you know uh is you know uh should have a kind of a program that that um you know uh is is beyond the normal crime and that's why the bar has to be high to prove it right i mean it can't just be you know random killing or now now professor i'll be the student again norman neymark writing in genocide of world history genocide has been a part of human history from its very beginnings now let's move quickly here but genocide in the hebrew scriptures genocide and homer and then the romans in carthage right so the old testament genocide where do we see genocide okay so um the old testament i mean we have to be careful here because the old testament is not necessarily true right it's not necessarily yes yes yes i mean we have to be we don't know that things went on but what were just what was described in the old testament i must say was a shock to me i mean i was not much of a biblical student as a young man and when i went back i mean i was truly shocked um and even take something like um you know joshua joshua and taking jericho right now we all sing that spirituality but it doesn't say joshua then killed every man woman and child in that city and destroyed the city so that nobody would come back now we don't know i mean the important thing to say is we don't know that that really happened and you know archaeologists turns out been working on the jericho trying to figure out you know what happened how did the walls really come tumbling you know all that kind of stuff we don't know that this happened but that repeatedly in the old testament that you know there's a story of saul and samuel you you may remember where where uh you know samuel is the prophet god tells them you know talk to saul kill these people and saul goes off and he kills all these people and then he comes back and he turns out he spared the king and god is very angry and tells samuel that's it for sam tells samuel that's it for saul you know you have to know the loopholes yeah in other words you've got to kill them all thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them you shall destroy their altars and break down their images altars and images well see that's see what's so i mean i don't want to i mean what fits so perfectly is this notion this combination of what you could call cultural genocide which is the destruction of a people's culture so that they themselves even the few survivors can never the culture will be gone and you see this in genocide from then to the present in others you don't i mean you know you don't just take isis you know you don't just destroy the people you destroy their churches you destroy their books you destroy their historicals you destroy their monuments right and this has happened all the way through you know you you blow them blow and these days blow up their churches or in in bosnia you know you blow up the mosques why you do that well you're trying to destroy the entire people and its integrity as a people so that they won't exist anymore and it and it begins with the bible troy well uh the episode of the conquering of troy that we read about in homer right uh okay so this is the third it's not that's not in homework but that's i'm sorry and this is in the third punic war and basically uh what carthage is the carthage right oh you're talking about troy yes yes because okay i'm sorry there's a kind of triad in here in the okay right right right hebrew scriptures and then we go to to the greeks right right right okay okay so so the situation in troy is very very similar where um you know the um achaeans come and attack troy um you know there's all this sort of mythology about helen and all this kind of stuff which is very nice and very lovely and that's what you learn but what you don't learn is that when they destroy troy they kill everyone right you know they kill everyone and and they talk to each other about killing everyone and if you don't kill everyone you know then you're less than doing your duty you know in in doing your honor so it's the it's the it's the um totality you know of the destruction uh of troy and and indeed troy was destroyed totally i mean that was true and that archaeologists have that they've said that's actually right demonstrated right right and now uh carthage we have three punic wars carthage and rome lasts about a century and it ends how well the romans come i mean they they sort of in some fashion they hate carthage and not because you know they they're not a rival they're not a serious rival in the mediterranean i mean by that time rome really controls all of the mediterranean except for this these pieces of north africa small bit right where where carthage is there but i think it's uh fernan brodel the with the great uh historian of the mediterranean says you know the rome just couldn't stomach another power on the mediterranean and so this this hatred was built up in the senate and then they attack and and they not just attack and subjugate again you know this goes back to your question of war versus genocide you know you can attack and subjugate without massacring everyone in the town well as you know they not only massacre everyone in the town but they then destroy carthage blow up its walls you know all of the cultural monuments and then the mythology is they salt it you know but apparently there's not any real evidence for the salting you know but but they would have if they could they would have if they could in the image nothing will grow here again right so these people uh can't exist fits and it's a you know and and these these uh episodes you know the biblical the greek the roman make their way i mean the interesting part of this is not that they're just discreet episodes located you know a thousand years ago um or more than a thousand years ago right two thousand years ago and they um they are or three thousand years ago they are um they reside in our culture you know they reside in every culture every educated westerner knows right the old testament knows homer knows wrong right right norman in all three of those instances the people who engaged in genocide thought they were doing right portrayed it as their duty so where where do you locate we have to be very careful i guess i'll put this in the this is my thinking things through as i'm making notes in the margins of your book but there's always the danger that we moderns will look down on the ancients right and consider ourselves morally superior so is there a legitimate question to be asked along the following lines that in the times we're talking about in the ancient world that was the nature of warfare not not not genocide as we now understand it that if you wanted to defeat there were three punic wars after all the carthaginians wouldn't let it go and somehow in the end it was the romans who wouldn't let it go but but you had to wipe people out in those days otherwise you were just storing up trouble for your children and grandchildren a generation later they'd come back is there an argument for that or not i think there is an argument for that i mean again you know all history is about argument and i think that that is a good one and that is an argument that can be made but i think the counter argument is more powerful and the counter argument is um and you see this um you know you see this uh in thucydides uh in the peloponnesian wars you see this uh even in some of the uh you know roman statesmen who were against you know this kind of of destruction there are those who propound you know winning a war and and you know making a peace and incorporating territory you know into your own and there are those who propound uh destruction this goes all the way up to the present you know so so you're always going to have people say no this is counterproductive this is a bad thing to destroy people who are ready to live productive and reasonable lives so i don't i i don't privilege the ancient world in that way and or the modern world you know alternatives even then and yes and they knew they weren't taken right you know their businesses there's there are questions about caesar and gaul you know who uh and there was a lot of destruction and goal you know a lot of the destruction of goal and you know if you would sit down and ask the question as i tried to do you know i tried i couldn't do everything in this right so um you know if you would ask yourself the question is that genocide you know what he did in gold you know the occupation policy some of the killing that went on massacres of which there were a great number my answer was no you know because it was pacification for the sort that you were saying for the same reason that sherman's march to the sea in this in the civil war right is an act of warfare right a nasty one maybe even a war crime maybe with caesar committed in gaul was a war crime but it wasn't genocide right all right there's differences genocide in the 20th century the holocaust is such a classic case this feels odd to say it because it can never be forgotten but we don't in in some way you and i don't need to dwell on it the nazis destroyed something like 6 million jews on their way to eliminating all jews and territories they controlled for the reason that they were jews right all right stalin you've said that your soviet your colleagues in soviet history push back they're not so so describe the events and then tell us why you consider what stalin did in the 30s a genocide and then i'd like to come to mao as well okay so as you know there's a little book called stalin's genocide and if i could summarize that by norman neymar yeah by me and i'm not sure i can summarize that very easily but let's let's let's just accept my definition of genocide which includes social and political groups stalin in the beginning of the 1930s is a product of the first five year plan and forced collectivization uh knew uh that he was in some senses in deep trouble does say neither of these things worked very well and he was the kind of leader uh who insisted on control but also um on eliminating any potential enemies and his notion of what a potential enemy was was blown way out of proportion so he paranoia paranoia i mean i i i agree robert tucker once said he suffered from a paranoid delusional syndrome and i can define that for you if you want but it i agree with that basic idea in other words you're not just out to get me but these cameramen and the people behind they're all out to get me too and those whole groups are out to get you not just individuals and so he creates groups right i mean that's an important part of my story because he's creating these groups out of social and political enemies that he puts in a group and gives them an identity now let me again use the kulaks as an example because that's it's the purest example of a non-they're not an ethnic group right they're not a religious group they're not racial it's a social social and economic standing right they're rich supposed to do peasants supposedly all right i mean they're not really i mean he's creating this group right because if you're you know you are opposed to the collectivization no matter who you are you're a kulak sometimes priests are koolocks your kids are koolocks you know who don't know the first thing about what collectivization's all about your wife is a cool like your grandpa's a groolock so he's creating a group he's in some ways ethnicizing the group meaning he's giving them certain kinds of characteristics that you know are common he's stereotyping them and then he's attacking them as a group and that attack occurs you know in 1931 32 33 they're attacked many are just shot the rest are sent off into gulag or many are sent you know the minions are sent off into the gulag where they die in special camps a lot of them and that sort of thing and they carry this appalachian kulak with them you know it's not as if you go into the gulag you're not a kulak anymore no it's stamped in your stuff you know you are a kulak and you know if you go fight the war later on world war ii they will sometimes let you off right but you're a kulak for life i mean you're you're sort of cree in other words a group is created i mean think okay so peter you said we can talk as yeah as friends so let's sacrifice so an ethnic group again is is a construction in many ways right it's a construction what that means basically you know all the a lot of the social science you're creating an ethnic group and some people may be members of it and some not again think about even the jews in germany some of them didn't think of themselves as part of that group at all and those within the group didn't think of them as part of the group yet the nazis make the ethnic group right they're creating the group you're not creating it so similarly stalin's creating these groups he creates other groups of asocials meaning you know alleged uh alcoholics alleged prostitutes alleged gamblers alleged street people all these people he puts him into a group called asocials and he arrests them as a socials and he shoots about a half of them and deports the rest of them we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people right this is another group that he kills off then there are attacks on other groups they're attacks actually in this case on ethnic groups on poles and on germans i mean there was a whole polish action which you know i include in my analysis i say you know you can think about it as genocide but maybe not you know in other words their ways again this is all about an argument and then he creates political groups i mean the three big purge trials and 38 you know were groups of people who had identities their relatives were arrested their friends were arrested they were all part of these groups they were attacked as groups again when i look at the purge trials and the killing and the um and the uh deportations and the suffering uh that went on it's it's hard to make a kind of really clear case you know black and white case for genocide but i think you can make the argument that this is a kind of political genocide so so i put all this together and call us stalin's genocide and the test that we agreed on a few moments ago was there anything that could member of the victim group could do once i had one stalin had identified me as a kulak once that got stamped in my papers i couldn't say no no comrade i've i've memorized marx i've memorized lenin i'll do any there's nothing there's no way out once you're identified as a member of the group he just keeps coming i mean there are always exceptions by the way peter let me let me just say even with the jews there were exceptions there were jews who survived the war in the vermont right i mean there are always exceptions uh there are armenians who survived women who converted and went into you know kurdish or turkish harems so they're always exceptions to genocide so the exception doesn't prove the rule but on the whole uh you know kulak's tried to escape their fate by going to work in the city in a factory but they came to get them yeah you know in 1937 38 they came to get them they wouldn't let them escape mal give me just a sentence or two on mao i know this is we're compressing worlds into into bullion cubes here give me a sentence or two on mao okay um especially the great leap forward which is 1958 right uh i think should be considered a genocidal action i mean basically what mao did is tried to move all of the peasantry into these gigantic communes and in doing so it was an absolute catastrophe which he would not recognize so in 58 and 59 we don't know exactly how many people died i mean frank decoder who comes to to hoover every once in a while you know has a number of 45 million people it's just staggering i mean andy walder who is here at stanford you know has a somewhat lower number in the in the 30 million number and what you see there is a different kind of campaign but nevertheless one where the government is attacking a group of people the peasantry and forcing them you know into a mold and and ready to see them die in other words you have we have all kinds of of quotations from now so it doesn't matter you know what's if what's more than millions of people we got plenty more i mean he says things like that you know what if they don't have anything to eat you have enough to eat he says that the party people that's all you need to worry about and you see that kind of um i mean it's not just indifference to suffering and to death it's a kind of purposeful and that's very important you know to the definition of genocide it's a very purposeful set of policies that kills large numbers of people and so i've included that in what i think is genocide the united states more than two sentences but i'm sorry no no no so last large topic here the united states and genocide first our own history let me quote you here genocide of world history the removal of the cherokees you talk about the native americans the american indians the removal of the cherokees from georgia in 1838 and their forced march on the trail of tears to a reservation in arkansas people are marched 800 miles to arkansas a fifth of them die on the way that cannot be considered genocide here the term ethnic cleansing can most fruitfully be applied close quote so in some way you recognize that horrible things happen in the settlement of this country but our own history and is by and large of course you have soldiers who say figures on the frontier who say the only good indian is a dead indian but fundamentally what the settlers wanted was the land right not the extirpation of a people right fair in the case of the cherokees in the case of the cherokees broadly no yeah in the book i also talk about the uk indians right here in california develop in california in mendocino county and there i consider that a genocide so the way i decided to deal i i think it's not useful to think either of the the killing off or the killing of native americans or by the way of aborigines in australia as genocide as a kind of general description of what happened i think you have to look at specific sets of incidences and since the indians themselves thought of themselves as different i mean the cherokee and the they don't think of themselves as yuki right and the yuki don't think of themselves as cherokee or navajo for that matter um i think you need to look at what happens to each of the tribes separately and when you look at what happens at the cherokee they really did want the land right and the cherokee fought like hell they actually had you know they had lawyers they fought in the courts you know they did the best they could with andrew jackson but jackson no was going to say you're going even the court the supreme court ruled in favor of the cherokee that they should be able to stay but no they had to go and as they went many died in a horrible set of events which i consider a horrible set of events but i don't think of as genocide because they didn't want to wipe out the cherokee in the case of yuki and other cases in california by the way there's a very good new book by a man named benjamin madley from ucla very recently called the california genocide i think and it's just out you know maybe a few months ago and i read it and it talks about more of california indians and what happened to our california indians and it's it's an incredible story but i just looked at the uk and came to the conclusion there that the people who wanted that land and who um you know were supported by the california government and the governor this is the late 19th century or right this is the 1860s 1860s so it's after gold rush and after statehood which comes in 48 and 1848 and the national government is not paying attention because it's fighting a civil war they're far they're way too far away all right besides they wouldn't pay attention okay okay anyway no this is all local government stuff the first you know governor of california had to deal with the yuki uh set of issues and um the purpose there was to eliminate the uk you know you know not to drive them out not to send them to a reservation up in oregon or washington or a different part of california the purpose was to eliminate them and and you can see by these group called the ill river rangers you know it's a group of people commanded by a guy named jarbo who's looked at his job as to murder indians i got it all right um i'm still going to console myself that it wasn't national policy no no i don't think it was i think that's well the states had much more control over what happened yes all right so so there are we've got genocide to deal with in inside the united states in our own history let me come back to your to what we began with which is the balkans actually so i want to contract i was just i actually don't know how you're going to answer this two events in the mid-1990s and one is genocide begins taking place in the balkans as the serbs as the serbs place pressure on the muslims in the balkans and also in rwanda we have two different tribal groups in a kind of spasm it's just an amazing event of violence in a very brief period one group largely using machetes hacks to death 800 000 of the other group in the balkans the united states intervened we bombed the serbs we got them to back off we stopped it it was sloppy we may you could argue i don't know what you would argue we haven't never discussed this whether uh too slow waited for the germans too long but in any event we went in and in rwanda there were discussions we know in the clinton white house about whether we should intervene in rwanda and we didn't were we right in the balkans and wrong in rwanda right in both instances what is the duty of the united states when it sees a genocide taking place well i think you know both cases are terrible tragedies and whether we learned from those tragedies or not you know is a really interesting question and i'd like to pose it to samantha power who wrote about this and is you know our previous uh representative to the united nations both her tragedies both showed the failure of american policy the balkans intervention came late too late in other words we were pushed and pushed and pushed it's true we had a very clever opponent in slobodan milosevic and we were charmed by him a little bit sort of like you're charmed by a snake you know i mean it does happen in international politics and um we let him get away with far too much the clinton white house did not want to intervene in the balkans under no circumstances that they won't intervene and we know this from all kinds of writing about this in retrospect um they simply didn't want any part of this if they could avoid it the problem was the the um serbs kept pushing our nose into it you know they kind of let up and make some kind of deal and then they push our nose into it again and again and again and the last time they pushed our nose in it was july of 1995 when they did commit genocide at srebanitsa and what happened at srebanitza you probably recall about 8 000 bosnian muslim men and boys were taken out and shot and killed and executed and buried in mass graves and madeleine albright went to the u.n and waved you know pictures aerial photographs of these mass graves which we had and we realized what had happened and at that point i mean we had been there we'd been pushing there's been french and you know troops there americans had been you know trying to negotiate but there was no real intervention until really i mean i don't i want to try to describe this in the most analytical and less judgmental terms i can so i would say until you know it was demonstrated beyond any measure of a doubt that we had to intervene the clinton white house would have been in big trouble with the american public and with the world and so we intervene you may remember in the fall and we bombed the bosnian serbs for the first time serious bombing which we and the british carried out together we and they they said uncle they gave up right and that's led to dayton right right the agreement in the fall so so that's bosnia bosnia is a terrible tragedy kosovo was something different where we moved more quickly right but bosnia i think remains a dark spot on american policy and i think anybody with anything to do with it feels a lot of guilt about being so late in rwanda rwanda is just plain dark spot right in other words rwanda was a case you know where this there was this u.n general dalair a canadian you know uh general uh who had a small group of troops in um he was commanding some u.n troops in rwanda and he said you know something's coming here they're going to kill you know meaning the the hutu we're going to go after the tutsi help me send us something and i can take care of it i mean they'll have to send very much but you do need to take action the u.s and the u.n needed to take action and in neither case did they do so we i think were burned by somalia you know which happened earlier right and it the the country was just not ready to get involved in foreign you know affairs like that so last last question so both are both are bad okay so last question we have now a new president of the united states who says america first and who campaigned pretty clearly it's foreign policies complicated and parsing this president's foreign policy statements is also complicated but it seems very clear i think this is very clear that he believed the invasion into iraq and was a terrible mistake and that this notion of nation built the notion that the united states ought to do good in the world no more we only intervene in the world when our direct interests are at stake i think that's a fair characterization of what seems to be the trump foreign policy the foreign policy test we go only if we have a direct interest now you mentioned a moment ago we have isis cutting off the heads of christians there's there's a form of genocide taking place in the territory controlled by isis and you say what to president trump you say we have a duty to stop that kind of stuff because why because at some level simply doing the decent thing is an american interest how do you construct that the argument i would put it in exactly those terms my patriot you know i like this country and i owe it a lot and and and so to all of us um uh so you know in some fashion that that doesn't bother me but um it does not mean that the rest of the world is to be ignored or that serious crises where we can do some good you know should be avoided under on on all costs and that when genocidal situations come up it seems to me we have the obligation the moral and ethical obligation which is part of what national interest is about i mean national interest is not just about you know oil and and money and and prosperity is being able to look at ourselves in the mirror it's about exactly right you put that exactly right and uh being able to look yourselves in the mirror and not only that look at other people around the world in the mirror not in the mirror but look in their eye and say we did everything we could to help you know within reason and within um you know you know the judgment of good people who are in this administration and there are some who can decide you know whether this will be successful or not you know we have a we've signed on and the u.n has signed on to a to a doctrine called responsibility to protect and that responsibility to protect says clearly you know that that you know sovereign countries countries around the world have to cannot engage in you know destructive actions against their own people or the rest of the world is has to act you know we have to act we have to be part of an entire world and so you know my sense of this is i mean i can't tell you peter you know what i would have done in syria at specific times along the way it's very difficult it's a difficult situation it's a hard situation you have to you have to try to figure in how many how many how many boys are going to lose and girls women men and women of the armed services you know what is it what are the costs of intervention you have to figure that in and that's part of thinking about our interests but it doesn't mean that you ignore you know these horrible genocidal situations right before i came on your program i'll just just a little footnote i looked up um you know on the online you know contemporary genocidal situations and people listed you know 10 of them around the world taking place right now right now right now uh what you know the main one being in syria i think that's at the top you know and the yazidis and christians and the yazidi kurds who were already cut to pieces and could be cut to pieces more um and christians and you know it's not the same as genocide itself but it is a situation which one has to you know pay attention to and think about and try to help those folks you know who are threatened with have with elimination as a group of human beings you know i mean you know individuals who want to help too but this is a whole group you know these yazidi kurds are a part of a part of all of us norman neymark author of genocide a world history thank you thank you you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 171,612

Keywords: Norman Naimark, genocide, ethnic cleansing, Geneva Conventions, Rohingya genocide, Rwandan genocide, Armenian genocide, Stalin’s genocide, Yuki genocide, geopolitics

Id: BXL9VG6GoLU

Length: 49min 8sec (2948 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2017