Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Extremely violent societies
- Part I Participatory violence
- Part II The crisis of society
- Part III General observations
- 7 The ethnization of history: The historiography of mass violence and national identity construction
- 8 Conclusions
- Notes
- Index
7 - The ethnization of history: The historiography of mass violence and national identity construction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: Extremely violent societies
- Part I Participatory violence
- Part II The crisis of society
- Part III General observations
- 7 The ethnization of history: The historiography of mass violence and national identity construction
- 8 Conclusions
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Scholarship along the lines of the concept of genocide (and more recently ethnic cleansing) has been intertwined with narratives intended to create national identities. This connection is so common and has led to so many limitations, simplifications, and distortions in research on mass violence that it appears worthwhile to discuss it in detail and to devote a section of this book to it. The example of Bangladesh, to which I shall refer throughout this chapter, is symptomatic of these politics but in no way exceptional. Occasionally I will also point to interpretations of other cases of mass violence, including some that have been dealt with in previous chapters as well as some others.
According to the standard version in genocide studies, the Pakistani military clamped down on the peaceful East Bengali autonomy movement that had won general parliamentary elections. The West Pakistani junta attempted to kill off the Bengali intelligentsia (including Awami League supporters, professors, and university students) and the Hindus, an attempt that was overcome – after claiming three million lives, driving ten million into exile, and devastating the country – by the general resistance of Bengalis. Pakistani soldiers raped 200,000 Bengali women. Some thousand ‘Biharis’ also fell victim to the understandable wrath of the Bengalis, given that they had aided the Pakistani hordes (see Chapter 4).
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- Information
- Extremely Violent SocietiesMass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World, pp. 255 - 265Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010