>> I really cannot see what is gained by narrowing the definition of genocide
> as you have done. Now the chickens come home to roost: you end up having to
> come up with this humungous red herring that genocides need to be centrally
> controlled. That's rubbish, as a casual review of the history of pogroms
> indicates pretty clearly.
>
> My understanding is that Russian and Polish pogroms in the 19th century were
> officially authorized and encouraged.
Yes, that's true. But there are two points that should be made. One is that there is organization, and then there is Organization. The sort of elaborate zweckrational thinking of the Nazis seems absent from the Rwandan example, or from the kind of exploitation of public hatred the Tsar went for. The Nazis also seem to have genuinely believe their crazy ideas, whereas the impression that I got was that the Russian officials were pretty cynical.
The other point is that much of the earlier activity in Germany and France had been very much autonomous. Norman Cohn, does point to a very interesting issue when he comments how people would get funny ideas about making everyone equal, then they would say "aha! let's get the nobles!" and suddenly they would be killing Jews in huge numbers. The church would have to - half-heartedly - try to control the upswell of popular anger. The central authority was in many cases strongly opposed to annihilating the Jews.
>
>> You might say that those were not genocides...
> well, but what do you call it when the people's crusade casually wipes out
> almost the entire Jewish population of France? I don't like Norman Cohn's
> writing on millenarian movements all that much,
>
> Why not?
I think that there are several problems with it. The most obvious one is the outright contempt he seems to have for the people he is writing about. That's hard to avoid, I suppose, when you are dealing with a Master of Hungary, the crusaders and whatnot, but when it comes to the Anabaptists activists it becomes clear that he has a hatchet ready for anyone out to provoke radical change. His gripe seems to be with radicalism itself, and at this point I think he is reading backwards from his interpretation of the two totalitarianisms of his time. He even hints at the idea that radicalism is comparable to a psychological dysfunction. Conversely there is a far too rosy picture of the medieval church, of the knights, which is quite conservative, and more than just a little bit naive. Though there is a very important point to be made by pointing to the precedents of totalitarianism, Cohn's historiographical point of view seems to be based on projecting 20th century totalitarianism backwards. It's still a very impressive history, and the chapter on Müntzer is really important for delusional fans of Engels, but it is definitely told from an elite perspective. One big problem with that is that we learn about these movements from people who had theological disputations with them, and though Cohn is aware of this, he seems to think that it is sufficient to be neutral as to the judgements of the chroniclers, but by that point the real damage is already done: the matter has been construed from a theological perspective.
For analysing religious peasant uprisings, I am huge fan of Ranajit Guha's work on Indian uprisings - Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency and the article "The Prose of Counterinsurgency". In my opinion, that's the way to go. Wrong continent and mode of production, unfortunately.
Thiago