Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century--A Bit More
Explanation
A Project by Hunt
Tooley
For the curious, I would like to elaborate just a bit here on both
topic and approach of the Mobley Project I have designed. I
have spent a great deal of my academic career studying mass violence in
twentieth-century Europe (my first publication, nearly thirty years
ago, was about forced labor in the Third Reich). I have taught
courses focusing on the Holocaust many times, and in my Russian history
classes, students have done major work on Stalinist mass killing and
forced migration. My books and articles have dealt in very direct
ways with ethnic violence in East Central Europe and Germany, ethnic
cleansing, and the two global wars of the twentieth century. A
2003 volume that I edited (along with Steven Vardy) included the
results of a conference we had organized specifically to do comparative
history of the woefully abundant cases of ethnic cleansing in modern
Europe. Deep in that project in the early 2000s, I began offering
a class on ethnic cleansing in the modern world at Austin
College.
At some point in all this, I began writing book about the rise of
ethnic violence and mass violence in the twentieth century.
Granted, mass violence has always existed. We can read about it
in the Bible. Yet mass violence seems to have declined--on the
whole--in Medieval Europe, and after a rise in mass violence associated
with the rise of the state from about 1500 to 1800, Europeans, at least
in Central and Western Europe, seemed to be turning away from mass
violence. The violence of states against their own citizens and
neighboring citizens declined by the end of the eighteenth
century. Increasingly, even though warfare remained deadly and
grew in scale during the nineteenth century, states and their armies
recognized that killing civilians and prisoners was wrong, if still
sometimes practiced. Studies have shown us that this overall
decline in violent and brutal tendencies was indeed real. But
beginning in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Europe was
impacted by Social Darwinism, the new imperialism, an almost biological
version of nationalism and chauvinism, and many more influences.
By the time of World War I, and even a little before, these trends
toward brutality and violence were in place to provide a backdrop to
the horrors of that conflict. Even worse, the Bolshevik
Revolution, the political settlement of the war, and the emergence of
intensely nationalist states based on with large minorities led to a
postwar period that produced, over the next thirty years, the most
extensive bloodletting in history, "democide" as political scientist R.
J. Rummel called it. At the same time, the backwash of these
violent European politics in some ways energized brutality all over the
world, perhaps lending a kind of synergy to tensions ranging from race
relations in the United States to widespread Japanese violence against
ethnic groups coming within its empire in the thirties and
forties.
Hence, the topic as I have defined it is broad. The modalities
for carrying out this project are much more focused. For one
thing, the earliest stages of the Project are already in place.
As mentioned, I began writing my book some time ago, and it is my
intention for this project to push me toward finishing this
volume. Secondly, I have already recruited four of our
outstanding History students at Austin College to join me in attending
the Southern Historical Association Conference. The upshot of
their attendance will be a public roundtable on campus, and a number of
student research initiatives. I am bringing at least one speaker
on campus to discuss recent issues of genocide and survival in the
coming months. Further, the Project will encourage students to
choose related topics for their research papers, with a view to
creating a panel at one of the upcoming Phi Alpha Theta grad
student/undergrad conferences. I will be doing some travel to
research repositories as a part of the program, as well as stepping up
my activities in delivering papers, including three in the first year
of the Project, one of these at the University of Oldenburg, in
Germany.
