Part III Frontier Genocide

Part III Frontier Genocide Introductory note Central to the existence of empires, the ‘frontier’ constitutes a site of imperial politics at the edge of empire, a site crucial to both national security and national prestige. An important spatial feature of territorial empire, it also serves as a springboard for future expansion and/or a defensive barrier for consolidating the expansion previously obtained.1 In the era of the modern nation-state, the ‘frontier’ can function as a marker of national identity, as an instrument of state policy, as an ‘imag- ined community’ (part of a nation’s political beliefs and myths), or as a term of discourse (whose meanings can change over time). In some historical contexts, it functions as an emotional and psychological divide, as well as a political-geographical line.2 Under settler colonialism, the ‘frontier’ was no longer an intercultural zone of contact but was, instead, perceived as new ‘living space’ into which settlers could continually migrate without regard to indigenous ways of life or to indigenous lives. The coming of ‘frontiers’, to be sure, brings a terrific ‘unsettling’ to indigenous peoples, along with a reordering of power, lands, and resources.3 In a world historical context, the ‘frontiers’ of empire often erupt in violence, warfare, and bloodshed, as the ‘frontier’ becomes the site of widespread and brutal killing, uprooting, and destruction.4 In the academic literature on ‘violence’, scholars have traditionally defined and characterized ‘violence’ as the use of force with an intention to inflict bodily harm, with an emphasis on inter-state war and war-making (against both combatants and non-combatants). In more recent studies, however, scholars have broadened the concept of ‘violence’ from physical harm and killing to other forms of violence used by the modern 176 Frontier Genocide nation-state in both metropolitan and colonized ‘living space’ (includ- ing coercion, a more ‘measured’ use of force, and various forms of social control).5 As comparative historian Charles S. Maier notes, empire’s ambitions, its territorial agenda, and its problematic frontiers ‘create an intimate and recurring bond with the recourse to force’ and extreme political violence. As a result, these imperial projects, he observes, ‘claim their toll of those who resist and often those who are merely in the way’. For the most part, empire’s zones of violence, he claims, almost always lie outside the metropole itself – beyond the ‘frontiers’, in the colonial periphery. For those in the metropole, then, the violence and bloodshed were far away and often not visible. Thus, it was, he says, both ‘easy and necessary to look away from violence erupting at the periphery’. In modern times, he concludes, empires ‘depend upon distance’ and upon ‘rendering violence remote’.6 In many settler-colonial contexts, genocide is closely linked to the processes of imperialism and colonialism.7 In the broader scope of human history, I would not necessarily argue for (or subscribe to) an overdetermined link between settler colonialism and genocide. I do, however, share Patrick Wolfe’s reasoned view that, for ‘alien’ and ‘unwanted’ indigenous populations, ‘settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal’. To be sure, there can be genocide in the absence of settler colonialism, as Wolfe notes; indeed, many other genocidal episodes are not (or do not seem) assignable to settler colonialism. Likewise, genocidal outcomes are not inevitable in settler-colonial projects. That being said, in a number of different historical settings, as Wolfe concludes, settler colonialism and genocide have converged, and settler colonialism has manifested as genocide.8 In the settler-colonial context, especially, genocide is a process, rather than an event or a single decision.9 ‘War’ and ‘genocide’ have been called the ‘Siamese twins of history’. Most scholars of mass political violence, furthermore, recognize intimate connections between the two phenomena.10 In the contemporary world, ‘war’ and ‘genocide’ are the two most prevalent forms of orga- nized killing in modern society. As such, they are closely related, with numerous links and connections between the two modes of action.11 In addition, genocide is a major tendency of modern war. Given the ‘general hybridity’ of war and genocide, ‘genocidal war’, as historical sociologist Martin Shaw suggests, is ‘probably the most common form of genocide and a very common form of war’.12 Many genocide scholars position ‘war’ as genocide’s greatest single enabling factor. Frontier Genocide 177 Crucially, in many instances, ‘war’ provides a convenient ‘smokescreen’ for ‘genocide’ – that is, ‘war’ becomes the perpetrator’s excuse and rationale for ‘eliminationist’ and ‘exterminationist’ assaults against targeted civilian non-combatant populations.13 ‘Wartime’, as genocide scholar Robert Melson notes, often ‘provides some of the conditions facilitating the formulation and implementation of the decision to com- mit genocide.’14 Indeed, most ‘genocide’ occurs in contexts of more general ‘war’.15 ‘War’ and ‘genocide’ are both forms of armed conflict. In his original conception of ‘genocide’, the Polish jurist and historian of mass violence Raphael Lemkin (who coined the term in 1943) rightly argued that ‘genocide’ not only most often occurs within the background of ‘war’, but is, in fact, a form of warfare. The main distinction between the phenomena, in his view, ‘lay in who the war was being waged against’.16 The key difference between them, then, lies in the nature of the ‘enemy’: In ‘war’, the ‘enemy’ is another state or armed force; in ‘genocide’, however, the ‘enemy’ is a group of civilian non-combatants or targeted ‘out-groups’ ear-marked for ‘reduction’, ‘elimination’, or ‘annihilation’. As historical sociologist Martin Shaw suggests, these ‘out-groups’ are often defined as ‘enemies’ in the fundamentally military sense of the word, justifying the use of extreme physical violence against largely unarmed civilian populations. Even in peacetime, he rightly observes, ‘genocide’ is a form of ‘war’ against targeted ‘out-groups’.17 The final part of the book looks at how ‘continental imperialism’ and ‘settler colonialism’ manifested as ‘genocide’ in the ‘American West’ and the ‘Nazi East’. In both cases, ‘war’ provided both the cover and the pretext for ‘genocidal’ assaults against allegedly ‘inferior’ and ‘unwanted’ ‘out-groups’. Social actors, in both cases, used the term ‘remove’ to describe the radical removal of ‘unwanted’, ‘alien’ peoples from metropolitan and colonized ‘living space’, and they used the terms ‘extirpation’ and ‘extermination’ to describe the destruction of indigenous peoples who stood in the way of the settler state ‘obtaining’ new Lebensraum. Chapter 6, ‘War and Genocide’, describes how ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘genocide’ converged within the specific historical contexts of Early America and Nazi Germany, as a distinct form of ‘war’ against civil- ians aimed at the intentional social destruction of targeted ‘out-groups’ by means of killing, violence, and coercion. It examines the similar dynamics driving genocidal violence in the ‘American West’ and the ‘Nazi East’. It surveys the wide range of similar genocidal measures used by both nation-states to ‘remove’ ‘alien’ ‘others’ from the metropole 178 Frontier Genocide and to ‘control’ and ‘reduce’ indigenous populations in the newly colonized ‘living space’. It also considers deliberate acts of systematic, exterminatory violence carried out – by both state and non-state actors – against non-combatant indigenous populations on the ‘frontiers’ of ‘the West’ and ‘the East’. And, finally, it explores the intentions, legitima- tions, and outcomes of genocidal violence in the ‘Wild West’ and the ‘Wild East’..

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