The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing [Paperback]

I liked this book, and found it to be a nice companion piece to Mann's book on fascists. In fact, I would say these two books are really best seen as two volumes of a single work on the forces that create and sustain organic nationalism, and then propel it down the path of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Is this specific work and the larger treatise on organic nationalism flawed? Yes, of course, every scholarly work is inherently flawed and incomplete -- experts on genocide will no doubt nit-pick his details here. But taken together Mann presents two works that are fairly compelling.

What I did find valuable in this book, however, is his argument that ethnic cleansing is the "dark side" of democracy. What does he mean by this? He states it pretty unequivocally on page 2:

"Let me make clear at the outset that I do not claim that democracies routinely commit murderous cleansing. Very few have done so. Nor do I reject democracy as an ideal - I endorse that ideal. Yet democracy has always carried with it the possibility that the majority might tyrannize minorities, and this possibility carries more ominous consequences in certain types of multiethnic environments."

Thus, Mann maintains that genocidal, murderous cleansing is the "dark side" of democracy because before the modern conception of democracy emerged there was no "enemy of the people" that, potentially, needed to be totally exterminated. In times of great social stress the demos of democracy can be replaced by the ethnos - that "the people" can come to hold an organic nationalist meaning as opposed to the pluralist, atomized-individual meaning it holds in the US other liberal democracies. How and why do modernizing peoples choose the organic nationalist path as opposed to the liberal path? Read Mann's book on fascists to find out. When do organic nationalists decide on genocide as opposed to mere repression? Read this book to find out.

A more serious flaw, however, is the possibility that Mann's work will stop here and not continue on to focus on how the nation can be identified in terms of religion (as with modern Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East) or with class (as it was with communism). Mann has a short chapter on Communist cleansing of "class enemies" in the Dark Side of Democracy, but the subject could really be an entire volume in an of itself. He also deals somewhat perfunctorily with religious fundamentalism in Fascists, but in a dismissive manner that I think does a disservice to the importance of the subject.

The great merit of this somber book is that it matter-of-factly includes the Armenian genocide along with the Holocaust as the two most important case studies that Mann examines. The two cases are linked by more than Hitler's infamous remark just before launching Operation Barbarossa "Who now speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?" The Turkish genocide of the Armenians was also perpetuated by the leadership of a modernizing State, in the context of war, using its organizational and administrative resources to their fullest capacities in an attempt to murder as many members of an entire people as possible. For some reason, it does not sit well with many Holocaust scholars to refer to the tragic pioneering suffering of the Armenians at the hands of the Turks and their allies as genocide, but that was what it was. Mann acknowledges the similarities between the Armenian and Jewish experiences in this book, although he does not demonstrate particular insight into the events that produced the Armenian genocide. Nevertheless, in the prevailing climate of intellectual opinion, which forbids scholarly reference to the mass murders of the Armenians as a genocide, Mann's book constitutes a long step in the right direction.

Mann's two main theses are (1) that ethnic cleansing and genocide are, as his title indicates, "the dark side of democracy", and (2) that genocide and ethnic cleansing often develop their full-blown features as a series of immediate "solutions" to perceived obstacles or frustrations, they are not meticulously planned in advance with their ultimate goal clearly in view.

Despite the scholarly introductory chapter with its elaborate chart depicting Mann's theses (down to parts 4a, 4b, 5, etc.), Mann utterly fails to demonstrate the validity of his first thesis. On the face of it, the fact that his two principle examples, the Armenian and Jewish genocides, were perpetrated by Turks and Germans acting in the context of authoritarian dictatorships makes his case difficult to prove. While there is something in the idea that democracy can be confused with ethnicity, Mann can only show that this factor is at best a contributing one. Readers looking for a jaundiced view of the cruelty of which democracies are capable should read Jacob Burckhardt's THE GREEKS AND GREEK CIVILISATION; this book is the English translation of university lectures that poisoned at least two generations of Germans against the idea of liberal democracy, with catastrophic consequences. The German experience shows just how dangerous Mann's project really is. To say that ethnic cleansing is the "dark side" of democracy is a powerful indictment of democracy, and, given that he doesn't prove his thesis, Mann appears to have brought the charge recklessly. Hopefully, his book will have little of the influence on English-speaking readers that Burckhardt's did on German-speaking readers.

Mann does succeed in demonstrating his second main thesis which, if widely accepted, provides a framework in which policy tools can begin to be developed to try and prevent future genocides. Of course, the classic statement of this thesis was Arno Mayer's WHY DID THE HEAVENS NOT DARKEN? This great book was heavily criticized by some Holocaust scholars who thought that they saw an exculpatory element in Mayer's assertion that the killing of 6 million Jews was not planned by the Nazis from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, both Mayer and Mann show amply that the "contingent" and evolving nature of most genocide is as evil and cruel a human activity as it is possible to imagine. There is no point scanning the horizon for a government busy creating a fully articulated vision of extermination, because that's not how genocide develops. And for pointing to that truth, this book, for all its flaws, is worth a read by those seeking to understand this grim subject.

Ethnic cleansing has been practiced by signers of the Atlantic Charter in the past and continues to be practiced by emerging democracies of today. A book addressing this issue is a welcome addition to the literature of the evolving history of human rights. Thus it is with great anticipation that I turned to the "Dark Side of Democracy". Unfortunately, the book falls awfully short of its promise. Its title is misleading and it contains a large number of misstatements of facts and factual errors and omissions.

Neither the Armenian Genocide, atrocities of the Nazis and Communists nor Rawanda have anything to do with democracy as is implied by the book's title.

Misstatements and distortions are too numerous to list, but here is a brief sampling:

On p. 301 the reader is told that "In 1946 a Hungarian court in Cluj (now Kolosvar)..."

The problems with the assertion are the following:

(1) in 1946 the town you call Cluj was known to the overwhelming part of its population as Kolozsvar. In fact, the Romanian authorities renamed Kolozsvar (note the misspelling in the book) to Cluj-Napoca in 1974.

(2) There did not exist a "Hungarian court" in Kolozsvar in 1946.

On p. 305 in the section describing Romania the statement is made "Wild deportation began of the 200,000 Transylvanian Jews, more than 20,000 gypsies..." R. Braham, the internationally recognized expert in the field, in the introduction to "Tragedy of Romanian Jewry", Columbia University Press, 1994 writes "Jews of Old Romania and Southern Transylvania fared even better. Although they were subjected to great economic hardship, ...they survived the war almost intact."

Descriptions of many events are incomplete. On p. 299 the reader is told about 3,300 civilians murdered in Voivodina by the Hungarian Army, but no mention is made of the terrorist activities preceeding these events. No mention is made of the fact that the Hungarian Army court martialed the officers responsible, the only instance where officers on the Axis side were held responsible for the killing of civilians, including Jews.

The book fails to mention that alone of the allies of Nazi Germany, Hungary despite German occupation at the time, used its troops to protect Jews from deportation. Horthy ordered the Hungarian First Armored Division to Budapest preventing the deportation of Jews, about to be carried out from the Hungarian capital, in June 1944.

It is remarkable that no mention is made of the murder of the estimated 30-40,000 Hungarian civilians by Tito's henchmen after the conclusion of the Second World War. Several books, some in English, exist on the subject.

The book fails to mention the infamous, racist Benes Decrees that was the basis of depriving the autochthonous Hungarian population, living on land that was part of Hungary for a millenium but assigned to Czechoslovakia, of property, citizenship and deporting countless to slave labor. Ethnic Germans did not fare any better. The New York Times reported that the family of former secretary of state M. Albright profited from the seizure of German owned property.

It is even stranger that the book makes scant mention of the estimated 2 million Germans who died as a result of ethnic cleansing of Germans from the East.

The sentence on p. 355 "Germans flocked peacefully home" is offensive and mockery of the facts. For example, ethnic Germans of Romania, who were not murdered or deported to the Soviet Union, were allowed to leave only after the German government paid a ransom. These people left behind all their properties, owned by their families for centuries, with scant compensation.

It is rather disturbing that the book on ethnic cleansing does not reference or mention two standards on the subject: "Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe", edited by S.B. Vardy and T.H Tooley, C.U. Press, 2003 and the A. M. de Zayas "Terrible Revenge", St. Martin's Press, 1994.

Sixty years after these terrible events the reader has a right to be told all that is known about these events and not an excerpt of some of the facts. That this is possible is shown by J. Faragher "A Great and Noble Scheme", Norton, 2005 retelling the expulsion of French Acadians from their homeland. The "Dark Side of Democracy" falls far short of these expectations.