A BBC journalist makes an atrocious "explanation" of atrocities
Allan Little speaks about how hatred combined with fear are mobilised to commit atrocities throughout history! I emailed the BBC requesting the scholars and the studies Little relied upon to make his claims, for he never mentions a single source or authority on the subject. I am still waiting fir a response.
In The Dark Side of Democracy, an article (which is also the title of his book), the prominent sociologist Michael Mann included in his analysis of genocide and mass killings an excellent discussion of other scholars of the subject. (Michael Mann 1999)
"Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is seen as a regression to the primitive—essentially anti-modern—and is committed by backward or marginal groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions have little to do with us. An alternative view—often derived from a religious perspective—sees the capacity for evil as a universal attribute of human beings, whether ‘civilized’ or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the case of genocide, these seem less primitive than distinctly modern."
Leo Kuper (1981) "essentially founded genocide studies by noting that the modern state’s monopoly of sovereignty over a territory that was, in reality, culturally plural and economically stratified created both the desire and the power to commit genocide.
Roger Smith has stressed that genocide has usually been a deliberate instrument of modern state policy." (R. Smith in Genocide and the Modern Age, 1987)
Allan Little mentions only a small-scale "atrocity committed by 'a democracy': My Lai, during the Vietnam War—which, when exposed, was indeed prosecuted and condemned by American democracy." This echoes Rudolph Rummel (1994) who "fails to distinguish the more important cases of 'democratic mass killings’, like the fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, the dropping of the atomic bombs or the napalming of the Vietnamese countryside—whose casualties he also minimizes. Though some degree of military secrecy was obviously maintained in these cases, nonetheless, the American and British governments took these decisions according to due democratic constitutional process." (See Michael Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy)
"After all," states Mann, "almost all historical régimes were authoritarian yet did not commit mass murder."
Robert Melson (1992) "does not note that the growth of the ideologies of nation, race and class, which were used to legitimate genocide, all surged in modern times with or without the
accompaniment of revolution or war..."
We must realize, emphasises Mann, "that this has been the perverted product of the most sacred institution of Western modernity: democracy. For genocide can be seen in two distinct ways as ‘the dark side of democracy’—the most undesirable consequence of the modern practice of vesting political legitimacy in ‘the people'."
Genocide occurred very rarely in the centuries preceding the twentieth-century.
I can only wonder what such an explanation with no reference to any authoritative study indicates and the impact of such dessimination of mediocrity in "raising the educational level" of the Brits and others.
Allan Little speaks about how hatred combined with fear are mobilised to commit atrocities throughout history! I emailed the BBC requesting the scholars and the studies Little relied upon to make his claims, for he never mentions a single source or authority on the subject. I am still waiting fir a response.
In The Dark Side of Democracy, an article (which is also the title of his book), the prominent sociologist Michael Mann included in his analysis of genocide and mass killings an excellent discussion of other scholars of the subject. (Michael Mann 1999)
"Murderous ethnic and political cleansing is seen as a regression to the primitive—essentially anti-modern—and is committed by backward or marginal groups manipulated by clever and dangerous politicians. Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions have little to do with us. An alternative view—often derived from a religious perspective—sees the capacity for evil as a universal attribute of human beings, whether ‘civilized’ or not. This is true, yet capacity for evil only becomes actualized in certain circumstances, and, in the case of genocide, these seem less primitive than distinctly modern."
Leo Kuper (1981) "essentially founded genocide studies by noting that the modern state’s monopoly of sovereignty over a territory that was, in reality, culturally plural and economically stratified created both the desire and the power to commit genocide.
Roger Smith has stressed that genocide has usually been a deliberate instrument of modern state policy." (R. Smith in Genocide and the Modern Age, 1987)
Allan Little mentions only a small-scale "atrocity committed by 'a democracy': My Lai, during the Vietnam War—which, when exposed, was indeed prosecuted and condemned by American democracy." This echoes Rudolph Rummel (1994) who "fails to distinguish the more important cases of 'democratic mass killings’, like the fire-bombing of Dresden or Tokyo, the dropping of the atomic bombs or the napalming of the Vietnamese countryside—whose casualties he also minimizes. Though some degree of military secrecy was obviously maintained in these cases, nonetheless, the American and British governments took these decisions according to due democratic constitutional process." (See Michael Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy)
"After all," states Mann, "almost all historical régimes were authoritarian yet did not commit mass murder."
Robert Melson (1992) "does not note that the growth of the ideologies of nation, race and class, which were used to legitimate genocide, all surged in modern times with or without the
accompaniment of revolution or war..."
We must realize, emphasises Mann, "that this has been the perverted product of the most sacred institution of Western modernity: democracy. For genocide can be seen in two distinct ways as ‘the dark side of democracy’—the most undesirable consequence of the modern practice of vesting political legitimacy in ‘the people'."
Genocide occurred very rarely in the centuries preceding the twentieth-century.
I can only wonder what such an explanation with no reference to any authoritative study indicates and the impact of such dessimination of mediocrity in "raising the educational level" of the Brits and others.
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