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Revolution and Genocide
An Interview with Robert Melson
By Khatchig Mouradian
February 10, 2005
source: http://www.aztagdaily.com/interviews/melson.htm
“All victims of disasters think their disaster is unique in the world. It's a bit like having someone very close to you die in your family; you really don't want someone rushing to you saying, "I'm sorry this person died, but let me tell you that somebody else also died!" says Robert Melson in this interview.
As a survivor of the Holocaust, Melson has reason to feel that the suffering of his people was unique. However, trained in comparative politics, he also finds it important to draw parallels between the Holocaust and other Genocides. “If you're going to have some understanding, you have to compare,” he notes. In his book “Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust” (University of Chicago Press, 1992), Robert Melson does exactly that.
For him, “uniqueness does not mean incomparabilty, and comparability does not mean equivalence.”
Robert Melson has received his PhD in Political Science from MIT (1967). His research covers genocide and ethnic conflict in plural societies. Currently, he is the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. His book, “Revolution and Genocide” won the PIOOM Award from Leiden University for the best book in the field of Human Rights for 1993 and was also nominated for the Grawemeyer award. His other publications include, “False Papers: Deception and Survival in the Holocaust” and “Nigeria: Modernization and the Politics of Communalism” (with Howard Wolpe).
In this interview, conducted by phone on January 13, 2005, we discuss a number of issues related to genocide.
Aztag-You define genocide as “a policy initiative that uses massacre and other means to eliminate a communal group or social class from a social structure.” This definition is, as you yourself have noted, both wider than the UN definition and narrower. Why did you opt for this specific definition?
Robert Melson- Well, what I was trying to do is to solve the problem of the UN Convention (on Genocide). Many argue that the UN definition is too narrow, because it doesn't include political and socio-economic groups. It is also argued that the definition is too broad because it doesn't make a distinction between genocide in whole and genocide in part. My definition takes into consideration both criticisms. However, I'm not fixated on definitions; What I'm really interested in is the process, the reality of what leads to genocide and what stops genocide. Genocide, to me, is a planned wide-scale destruction of innocent human beings in its largest sense, and what I was doing in the book was trying to be scholarly and more exact as far as definitions are concerned, but it's not the most important thing.
Aztag- In one of your lectures, you say, "My parents began to discover the truth about what had happened to the jewish people, but it was knowledge without understanding." Was it the need to "make sense of the insensible" that shaped your research interests?
Robert Melson- Yes, I think that's a good way of putting it. I'm trained as a political scientist, and as I was doing political research I found that on the one hand I was practicing my profession and on the other hand, what was uppermost on my mind and what was most worrying to me was my past; the Holocaust, the destruction of my family. So the personal solution for me was to bring my research and my thinking in line with my interest and that's what I did; I have to say that it took a number of years to work this out.
Aztag- And why is this “understanding” important for a survivor of genocide?
Robert Melson- That's a very good question. Understanding doesn't bring anybody back to life, I'm not even sure understanding helps to prevent future genocides --although people have stressed that without understanding, prevention is not possible. At its most fundamental psychological basis, without understanding you're at the mercy of the past; you feel that you have no control over it, you feel that you're victimized by it. Although understanding does not start a process of rebuilding the past, or bringing back the people who are victimized, but at least it gives you some control over your own thoughts. Understanding is, in a way, a selfish process, it's a way of dealing with your own crisis. I guess the analogy would be someone who has a serious illness --let's say cancer-- and knows it's a terminal cancer. One of the things he would do is to try to understand cancer; this won’t make the cancer go away, but the understanding helps him to deal with it. Maybe that's as good as an answer as I can give you.
Aztag- What about comparing?
Robert Melson- I'm not a historian, I'm not a sociologist and i'm not a psychologist; I do comparative politics. So I naturally use the methodology and the approaches that I've been trained with, and I happen to think that it's the best way. I think that is the way; if you're going to have some understanding, you have to compare. Comparison is, in a way, the basis of all science. Without it, you can't understand or even measure something! You have too have a reference point; how big is the lamp that is on my desk? The question is, “compared to what?”
Aztag- And being a Holocaust survivor and a researcher of the Holocaust, there is the sensitive issue of uniqueness, which can make comparison a harder endeavor, can't it?
Robert Melson- I guess all victims of disasters think their disaster is unique in the world. It's a bit like having someone very close to you die in your family, you really don't want someone rushing to you saying, "I'm sorry this person died, but let me tell you that somebody else also died!" You're not in the mood for that; it’s not appropriate. However, if you're a physician and you're trying to understand a disease, you look for different cases of this disease --again going back to the notion of comparison--to be able to see under what conditions does this disease manifest itself.
Some parts of the Jewish community have been sensitive to the issue of comparison, both because the Holocaust was recent and so many people were affected by it, but there is another reason the uniqueness issue came up for the Jews; very often they were told "Well, yes, it's terrible that there was Holocaust, but many other people have suffered, so don't make such a big fuss about it, be normal like everybody else." And the honest reaction has been "Give us a chance to grieve a little bit! Give us a chance to bury our dead before you tell us to become normal." So there was a kind of an emotional reaction toward the comparison. But by now - we're not in 1955 - by 2005, with the Cambodian and Rwandan Genocide and with increased awareness on the Armenian Genocide, I think most people do recognize that there are more things in the world than one particular people being destroyed.
Aztag- Can you please briefly explain the argument you present in “Revolution and Genocide”?
Robert Melson- The main points are both in the introduction and the conclusion of the book. I was trying to compare the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and I was trying to look not only into the ideology of the Young Turks or of the Nazis, but also the circumstances under which both of these Genocides occured. A revolutionary transformation that occured in the Ottoman Empire with the coup against Abdul Hamid, and the circumstances were WWI. And then if you look at the Holocaust, it was the coming to power of Hitler which was also a kind of a revolution - he made it quite clear that he was a revolutionary and that the Nazis were revolutionaries - and the circumstances were WWII. So in both cases you have revolutionaries coming to power and then a genocide occuring during wartime.
And then a question comes up: Why? What is it about revolution and wartime that can, under certain circumstances, lead to genocide? I think the simple idea behind it is that revolutionaries try to transform their societies in profound ways, and one way to transform a society is to eliminate groups that don't fit into the identity that the revolutionaries would like their society to have. And what war does is that it enables these radical measures to take place, because wars close off societies and they call for military solutions to social problems. Now it's not true that every revolution leads to genocide - the American Revolution didn't lead to genocide, the English Revolution didn't lead to genocide - but under some conditions, some revolutions do lead to genocide. Similarly, not all genocides are products of revolutions. The destruction of Native Americans and the destructions of peoples in Africa were products of Imperialism, not revolution.
Aztag- When I was reading your book, I kept thinking about other cases of genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide…
Robert Melson- Yes, I just wrote and article about this in the book "The Specter of Genocide" edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan. In that chapter, what I do is extend the analysis from the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust to Rwanda. And again we have the pattern of revolution in the 1950s – the revolution in 1959 - and the Hutu coming to power, displacing the Tutsi, articulating a racialist ideology, the Hamitic ideology claims that the Tutsis were not originally a part of the nation, that they had come from Somalia or Ethiopia and, therefore, they ought not to have any power and they ought to be demoted from any postions that they have; very soon after, massacres occured. When you talk to people in Rwanda, they tell you that the genocide did not start in 1994, noting that the process of the genocide started in 1959. The war was the war between RPF (the Rwanda Patriotic Front) starting in 1990. Therefore, again, in Rwanda you have the conditions of revolution and war leading to genocide.
Aztag- What about Darfur? The events that have lately caused the displacement of more than a million people and the death of thousands of others; many are calling what is happening there genocide, others are falling short of using the word.
Robert Melson- Again, I know that president Bush and the US Congress have used the term "genocide", then again, if you go back to the UN definition, it talks about genocide in part and genocide in whole. Genocide in whole means extermination; this is what happened to the Tutsis, the Armenians, and the Jews in Europe. I think in Darfur there is genocide, but it's more like ethnic cleansing, it resembles more what happened in Yugoslavia, where people were being driven out and were being “punished” for political activities; this is not a planned extermination, but it's bad enough! Tens of thousands people have been killed already, and if there's not enough support, more people will be killed, so it is a genocide in part, but it is not the kind of extermination that I wrote about.
Aztag- When talking about the causes of the Armenian Genocide, Dadrian and Suny do give a minimal credit to the “provocation thesis”, according to which the actions of the Armenians caused the perpetrators to react with violence, but you completely dismiss it.
Robert Melson- I think the difference between Dadrian and Suny and me is a matter of emphasis. We all recognize that there were Armenian bands, that Russian troops committed atrocities against Turkish villagers in the Eastern Vilayets and so on. The real question is: Did these provocations cause genocide? Bernard Lewis and Turkish "explainers" argue that the provocations were the basis of genocide. My argument was rather simple, in any provocation, whether it's the Armenian genocide or when you're provoked by a colleague at work, how you react doesn't depend on the provocation, it depends on you-- what you are thinking , what your attitude is towards your colleague. Your action is not an automatic reaction to the provocation. If you're walking down the hall, and a colleague accidentally bumps into you, and you push him hard, your reaction is not automatically a product of his action. It's a product of you being mad that morning or disliking that person or being an aggressive person yourself. Consequently, to understand the actions of any person who is conducting violence you have to understand what motivates that person; it's not enough to look at what the victim has done. The victim might have done something, or the victim might have done nothing. That's it, that's really the basis of the argument. So what I was trying to argue is “let's look at what was happening to the Young Turks, what was going through their minds, rather than what the Armenians were doing.”
Aztag- You say in one of your papers that people sometimes emphesize the nationalism of the Armenians without looking at the nationalism of the Turks.
Robert Melson- Exactly. I mean, sure, there was nationalism - the Dashnaks, the Henchaks- yeah, there were nationalist movements. but what about the Turks?
Bernard Lewis's book "The Emergence of The Modern Turkey" is a wonderful book, a great book, but when it comes to the Armenian Genocide, his treatment is very strange. It's as if somehow the Turks became some kind of an automatic pilot, and had no conceptions of their own, no ideology of their own. Their ideology was nationalism, of course.
An Interview with Robert Melson
By Khatchig Mouradian
February 10, 2005
source: http://www.aztagdaily.com/interviews/melson.htm
“All victims of disasters think their disaster is unique in the world. It's a bit like having someone very close to you die in your family; you really don't want someone rushing to you saying, "I'm sorry this person died, but let me tell you that somebody else also died!" says Robert Melson in this interview.
As a survivor of the Holocaust, Melson has reason to feel that the suffering of his people was unique. However, trained in comparative politics, he also finds it important to draw parallels between the Holocaust and other Genocides. “If you're going to have some understanding, you have to compare,” he notes. In his book “Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust” (University of Chicago Press, 1992), Robert Melson does exactly that.
For him, “uniqueness does not mean incomparabilty, and comparability does not mean equivalence.”
Robert Melson has received his PhD in Political Science from MIT (1967). His research covers genocide and ethnic conflict in plural societies. Currently, he is the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. His book, “Revolution and Genocide” won the PIOOM Award from Leiden University for the best book in the field of Human Rights for 1993 and was also nominated for the Grawemeyer award. His other publications include, “False Papers: Deception and Survival in the Holocaust” and “Nigeria: Modernization and the Politics of Communalism” (with Howard Wolpe).
In this interview, conducted by phone on January 13, 2005, we discuss a number of issues related to genocide.
Aztag-You define genocide as “a policy initiative that uses massacre and other means to eliminate a communal group or social class from a social structure.” This definition is, as you yourself have noted, both wider than the UN definition and narrower. Why did you opt for this specific definition?
Robert Melson- Well, what I was trying to do is to solve the problem of the UN Convention (on Genocide). Many argue that the UN definition is too narrow, because it doesn't include political and socio-economic groups. It is also argued that the definition is too broad because it doesn't make a distinction between genocide in whole and genocide in part. My definition takes into consideration both criticisms. However, I'm not fixated on definitions; What I'm really interested in is the process, the reality of what leads to genocide and what stops genocide. Genocide, to me, is a planned wide-scale destruction of innocent human beings in its largest sense, and what I was doing in the book was trying to be scholarly and more exact as far as definitions are concerned, but it's not the most important thing.
Aztag- In one of your lectures, you say, "My parents began to discover the truth about what had happened to the jewish people, but it was knowledge without understanding." Was it the need to "make sense of the insensible" that shaped your research interests?
Robert Melson- Yes, I think that's a good way of putting it. I'm trained as a political scientist, and as I was doing political research I found that on the one hand I was practicing my profession and on the other hand, what was uppermost on my mind and what was most worrying to me was my past; the Holocaust, the destruction of my family. So the personal solution for me was to bring my research and my thinking in line with my interest and that's what I did; I have to say that it took a number of years to work this out.
Aztag- And why is this “understanding” important for a survivor of genocide?
Robert Melson- That's a very good question. Understanding doesn't bring anybody back to life, I'm not even sure understanding helps to prevent future genocides --although people have stressed that without understanding, prevention is not possible. At its most fundamental psychological basis, without understanding you're at the mercy of the past; you feel that you have no control over it, you feel that you're victimized by it. Although understanding does not start a process of rebuilding the past, or bringing back the people who are victimized, but at least it gives you some control over your own thoughts. Understanding is, in a way, a selfish process, it's a way of dealing with your own crisis. I guess the analogy would be someone who has a serious illness --let's say cancer-- and knows it's a terminal cancer. One of the things he would do is to try to understand cancer; this won’t make the cancer go away, but the understanding helps him to deal with it. Maybe that's as good as an answer as I can give you.
Aztag- What about comparing?
Robert Melson- I'm not a historian, I'm not a sociologist and i'm not a psychologist; I do comparative politics. So I naturally use the methodology and the approaches that I've been trained with, and I happen to think that it's the best way. I think that is the way; if you're going to have some understanding, you have to compare. Comparison is, in a way, the basis of all science. Without it, you can't understand or even measure something! You have too have a reference point; how big is the lamp that is on my desk? The question is, “compared to what?”
Aztag- And being a Holocaust survivor and a researcher of the Holocaust, there is the sensitive issue of uniqueness, which can make comparison a harder endeavor, can't it?
Robert Melson- I guess all victims of disasters think their disaster is unique in the world. It's a bit like having someone very close to you die in your family, you really don't want someone rushing to you saying, "I'm sorry this person died, but let me tell you that somebody else also died!" You're not in the mood for that; it’s not appropriate. However, if you're a physician and you're trying to understand a disease, you look for different cases of this disease --again going back to the notion of comparison--to be able to see under what conditions does this disease manifest itself.
Some parts of the Jewish community have been sensitive to the issue of comparison, both because the Holocaust was recent and so many people were affected by it, but there is another reason the uniqueness issue came up for the Jews; very often they were told "Well, yes, it's terrible that there was Holocaust, but many other people have suffered, so don't make such a big fuss about it, be normal like everybody else." And the honest reaction has been "Give us a chance to grieve a little bit! Give us a chance to bury our dead before you tell us to become normal." So there was a kind of an emotional reaction toward the comparison. But by now - we're not in 1955 - by 2005, with the Cambodian and Rwandan Genocide and with increased awareness on the Armenian Genocide, I think most people do recognize that there are more things in the world than one particular people being destroyed.
Aztag- Can you please briefly explain the argument you present in “Revolution and Genocide”?
Robert Melson- The main points are both in the introduction and the conclusion of the book. I was trying to compare the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, and I was trying to look not only into the ideology of the Young Turks or of the Nazis, but also the circumstances under which both of these Genocides occured. A revolutionary transformation that occured in the Ottoman Empire with the coup against Abdul Hamid, and the circumstances were WWI. And then if you look at the Holocaust, it was the coming to power of Hitler which was also a kind of a revolution - he made it quite clear that he was a revolutionary and that the Nazis were revolutionaries - and the circumstances were WWII. So in both cases you have revolutionaries coming to power and then a genocide occuring during wartime.
And then a question comes up: Why? What is it about revolution and wartime that can, under certain circumstances, lead to genocide? I think the simple idea behind it is that revolutionaries try to transform their societies in profound ways, and one way to transform a society is to eliminate groups that don't fit into the identity that the revolutionaries would like their society to have. And what war does is that it enables these radical measures to take place, because wars close off societies and they call for military solutions to social problems. Now it's not true that every revolution leads to genocide - the American Revolution didn't lead to genocide, the English Revolution didn't lead to genocide - but under some conditions, some revolutions do lead to genocide. Similarly, not all genocides are products of revolutions. The destruction of Native Americans and the destructions of peoples in Africa were products of Imperialism, not revolution.
Aztag- When I was reading your book, I kept thinking about other cases of genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide…
Robert Melson- Yes, I just wrote and article about this in the book "The Specter of Genocide" edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan. In that chapter, what I do is extend the analysis from the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust to Rwanda. And again we have the pattern of revolution in the 1950s – the revolution in 1959 - and the Hutu coming to power, displacing the Tutsi, articulating a racialist ideology, the Hamitic ideology claims that the Tutsis were not originally a part of the nation, that they had come from Somalia or Ethiopia and, therefore, they ought not to have any power and they ought to be demoted from any postions that they have; very soon after, massacres occured. When you talk to people in Rwanda, they tell you that the genocide did not start in 1994, noting that the process of the genocide started in 1959. The war was the war between RPF (the Rwanda Patriotic Front) starting in 1990. Therefore, again, in Rwanda you have the conditions of revolution and war leading to genocide.
Aztag- What about Darfur? The events that have lately caused the displacement of more than a million people and the death of thousands of others; many are calling what is happening there genocide, others are falling short of using the word.
Robert Melson- Again, I know that president Bush and the US Congress have used the term "genocide", then again, if you go back to the UN definition, it talks about genocide in part and genocide in whole. Genocide in whole means extermination; this is what happened to the Tutsis, the Armenians, and the Jews in Europe. I think in Darfur there is genocide, but it's more like ethnic cleansing, it resembles more what happened in Yugoslavia, where people were being driven out and were being “punished” for political activities; this is not a planned extermination, but it's bad enough! Tens of thousands people have been killed already, and if there's not enough support, more people will be killed, so it is a genocide in part, but it is not the kind of extermination that I wrote about.
Aztag- When talking about the causes of the Armenian Genocide, Dadrian and Suny do give a minimal credit to the “provocation thesis”, according to which the actions of the Armenians caused the perpetrators to react with violence, but you completely dismiss it.
Robert Melson- I think the difference between Dadrian and Suny and me is a matter of emphasis. We all recognize that there were Armenian bands, that Russian troops committed atrocities against Turkish villagers in the Eastern Vilayets and so on. The real question is: Did these provocations cause genocide? Bernard Lewis and Turkish "explainers" argue that the provocations were the basis of genocide. My argument was rather simple, in any provocation, whether it's the Armenian genocide or when you're provoked by a colleague at work, how you react doesn't depend on the provocation, it depends on you-- what you are thinking , what your attitude is towards your colleague. Your action is not an automatic reaction to the provocation. If you're walking down the hall, and a colleague accidentally bumps into you, and you push him hard, your reaction is not automatically a product of his action. It's a product of you being mad that morning or disliking that person or being an aggressive person yourself. Consequently, to understand the actions of any person who is conducting violence you have to understand what motivates that person; it's not enough to look at what the victim has done. The victim might have done something, or the victim might have done nothing. That's it, that's really the basis of the argument. So what I was trying to argue is “let's look at what was happening to the Young Turks, what was going through their minds, rather than what the Armenians were doing.”
Aztag- You say in one of your papers that people sometimes emphesize the nationalism of the Armenians without looking at the nationalism of the Turks.
Robert Melson- Exactly. I mean, sure, there was nationalism - the Dashnaks, the Henchaks- yeah, there were nationalist movements. but what about the Turks?
Bernard Lewis's book "The Emergence of The Modern Turkey" is a wonderful book, a great book, but when it comes to the Armenian Genocide, his treatment is very strange. It's as if somehow the Turks became some kind of an automatic pilot, and had no conceptions of their own, no ideology of their own. Their ideology was nationalism, of course.
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