Reigns of Terror.

Hill, John S.

Reigns of Terror, by Patricia Marchak. Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. xiv, 306 pp. $80.00 US (cloth), $22.95 US (paper).

This book argues that the origins of state terror--"gross human rights crimes arguing against their own citizens"--is to be found in the drive by regimes to create or preserve systems of inequality with material benefits for some when those systems have reached some sort of deadlock, when they can neither recreate themselves nor transform themselves into a viable new form. Thus, mass murder functions a sort of escape device for societies that have become trapped in a social and political dead-end.

The book is divided into two parts. Part one analyzes the conditions that lead to crimes against humanity. Marchak argues that non-democratic societies with robust security forces, but with little in the way of a civil society and without much ability to adapt to changing conditions, are the ones most likely to lash out against members of that society. She argues that identities such as race and ethnicity merely veil more fundamental identities that reflect systems of inequality tied to the distribution of material benefits. Marchak sees ideology, in particular, as the "bridge between the material interests [defended by the regime] and the acts of defense of them" (p. 87). Ideology explains identity and relationships in a way that privileges some lives over others. It is this privileging that helps justify violence. Attempting to explain the willingness of ordinary people to become killers, Marchak adopts the analysis of Christopher Browning and others. She indicts the usual suspects of habitual submission to authority, conformity to the group, and the emergence of rationalized bureaucratic systems as the Why, and psychological distancing from and dehumanization of the victims as the How. In concluding part one, Marchak examines the problems of when and how other states and international organizations might intervene to punish, arrest, or avert acts of state terrorism. She sees little benefit to the present or prospective victims in punishing a few malefactors after the fact. Furthermore, she recognizes that cases of genocide or politicide are hard to define while they are happening. Hence she argues for preventing the "killing fields" from being sown in the first place, by means of international aid to economic development in the Third World, the construction of social welfare systems in place of national security systems, and the acceptance of international legal norms and standards of human rights as superior to national sovereignty (pp. 153-55).

Part two contains eight case studies of state terror: the Armenian massacres of 1915-16, the famine in the Eastern Ukraine in 1932-33, the Nazi assault on Jews and others, the massacres in Rwanda and Burundi between 1972 and 1995, the right-wing repression of leftist movements in Chile, 1973-88, and Argentina, 1976-88, the mass death in Cambodia in the late 1970s, and the "ethnic cleansing" attending the break-up of the country formerly known as Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

The weaknesses of this book spring from its nature as impassioned advocacy-scholarship. First and least, as is the case with much comparative history, specialists will find themselves grinding their teeth over the treatment of their particular subject. The journalist William Shirer's 1961 book (still beloved of undergraduates) appears as a principal source on Nazi Germany; and readers might easily gain the mistaken impression that Stalin embarked on the Five Year Plans to create a society ruled by the industrial proletariat.

Second, the book offers one-sided argumentation armed with wide reading, rather than consensus scholarship. Marchak tends to cite those authors--Joseph Stiglitz and Guillermo O'Donnell, for example--who support her argument. Readers are left to investigate for themselves whether these authors represent the scholarly consensus and whether there are alternative views of the issues involved. Similarly, only two of the eight case studies are examples of leftist state terror. One might just as easily have studied the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China, the terrorization of the satellite states in Eastern Europe after the Second World War, and all the other aspects of Stalinist terror within Russia that went beyond the famine in the Ukraine. In numerical terms any one of these might swamp the death tolls in Chile, Argentina, and Yugoslavia. Marchak willfully ignores the argument that twentieth-century genocides often arose from "idealist" ambitions to create a racial or class utopia, rather than from "materialist" desires to erect or sustain systematic inequality.

The strengths outweigh the weaknesses by a long shot. Reigns of Terror is thoughtful and thought-provoking. It is studded with arresting observations. (The discussions of the personalizing of ideology, or of the hostility between urban and rural populations, offer good examples.) It shines with a decent humanity as Marchak seeks a viable solution to what has been called "a problem from Hell."

The elephant in the bath-tub in this book--alluded to with some frequency, but never systematically confronted--is the behaviour of the post-9/11 United States. In her discussion of recent events, that country, my country, is made to seem to conform, ever more closely, to the proposed model of a society on the precipice, but with its hostilities directed outward rather than inward. This is no happy thought, but one worth the discussion opened by Patricia Marchak.

John S. Hill

Immaculata University, Pennsylvania