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The End of Genocide
Monthly Review, VA
May 08, 06
by Michael Steinberg
In an age dominated by brute force and overwhelming military power -- in
other words, any age at all -- it is hard to remember that the simplest addition
to our vocabulary can change the world. This was what Raphael Lemkin
accomplished in 1944, when in a study on the Nazi occupation of Europe he coined
the word "genocide."
Just four years later, the concept entered international law in _the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide_
(http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/genocide.htm) , passed by the General Assembly of the
United Nations on December 9, 1948. That Convention gives the following
definition:
[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group,
as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (Article 2).
This makes "genocide" a peculiar type of crime. It is what lawyers call a
mens rea offense, one which encompasses a wide range of conduct whenever it is
done with a specific intention. Mass killing is what genocide calls to
mind, of course, but the prohibited acts include mass maiming, reducing the
living standards of people below the level needed to maintain the population,
forced sterilization and probably forced contraception, and the mandatory
surrender of parental rights.
Lawyers could go further. They know that "calculated" is a legal term of
art which refers to an objective standard of conduct. An act is calculated to
bring about a result if a reasonable person would know that the result was
likely to follow. Throwing someone overboard in the middle of Lake Superior is
calculated to kill the victim even if the person doing the throwing intends
nothing more than a harmless prank.
Put this way, there are a great many countries which have committed genocide.
Was apartheid not the imposition of serious mental harm on Black South
Africans, even those who never got in trouble with the police or the army? Didn't
_Canada_ (http://www.irsr-rqpi.gc.ca/english/historical_eve nts.html) take
First Nations children from their parents well into the twentieth century? How
about the 500,000 Iraqi children whose deaths due to _sanctions_
(http://www.commondreams.org/views/070700-103.htm ) was considered a price worth paying
by that gentle liberal _Madeleine Albright_
(http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084) ? And might not neoliberal "shock treatment" qualify under subhead
(c), considering that living standards in the former Soviet Union were brought
so low as a result that _the population declined dramatically_
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3984951.stm) ?
These are all highly debatable questions, of course, and I don't plan to
debate them. They're offered only to show that the specific definition of
genocide to which the world community adheres makes sense only within the context
of its birth. Genocide, as a crime, is a generalized description of Nazi
race policy. Each of the subheads was derived from a specific practice: (a)
from the death camps, (b) slave labor, (c) confinement in ghettos, (d) the
forced sterilization program, and (e) a little-known but real program to "rescue"
Aryan children from less suitable parents.
That's not all. Lemkin (or the UN) did more than allow the Nazis to define
the physical acts constituting genocide. In a way which is proving far more
troubling, they also let the Nazi paradigm define the other part of the
offense, the intent or mental state required. The new crime was limited to acts
intended to harm not specific, concrete human beings but "a national, ethnical
[sic], racial or religious group, as such." It is a crime which combines
violence with categorization. Given the breadth of the definition, in fact, it
is the categorization itself which stands at the heart of the offense.
Genocide is thus a crime of the imagination. It is harm with the belief
that every individual act of violence is a step towards the elimination of a
group. But this raises a question. Why does this intent convert murder into
something worse than murder?
The question is most horrifyingly pressing in contemporary Africa. The
victims in Darfur are described as Africans and the perpetrators as Arabs.
Genetically these two "groups" are identical, and there are reasons to believe that
the underlying conflict is one between farmers and pastoralists, but that is
irrelevant; what counts is the construction of group identity which allows
the killing and the burning of villages to be seen as the destruction of one
group by another. It is a murderous and largely -- though not entirely --
one-sided struggle, and it has produced hundreds of thousands of victims. The
heart-wrenching TV footage and the finger-pointing editorials may all be
merited. Yet while the "genocide" label makes Darfur the object of humanitarian
concern -- or at least the simulacrum of concern, aid budgets still not being
increased -- _the far vaster, longer, more horrendous slaughter in the Congo_
(http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/24/world/ main657774.shtml) goes on
with hardly a mention even on the inner pages of our newspapers of record. To
what point is one classified as genocide and the other as a mere civil war?
Is blood redder in Darfur?
Nor does the elimination of every sort of group fall within the definition of
genocide. In 1965 and 1966, for example, hundreds of thousands -- _perhaps
more than a million_ (http://www.frif.com/new2002/shap.html) -- people were
murdered in _Indonesia_ (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/) ,
mostly because of their real or rumored membership in the Communist Party.
Entire villages were wiped out. It was a slaughter that in its scope, its low-tech
brutality, and the resigned acquiescence of most of its victims seems an
eerie presage of Rwanda. But it was not genocide, because political groups are
not entitled to the protection of the convention. (Neither was _Stalin's
liquidation of the kulaks_ (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/coll.html) ,
because "social class" doesn't make the list either.) To hack a Communist to
pieces with a machete is only murder; to hack a Tutsi to death in the same way
is something else
And the mens rea of genocide is also a delusion, a delusion which seems to
have the power of contagion. Its almost inevitable failure is not due to the
technical difficulty of killing large numbers of people. It is the group
itself which slips away. Individuals may or may not escape; but the boundaries
of the category are certain to blur. The problem with the concept of
genocide is that, like the crime itself, it insists that things are otherwise.
Categories are always artificial, provisional, inaccurate, misleading. You
can group people any way you wish, but nothing will assure you that every
person so categorized will act the same as any other or that those uncategorized
will not turn out to be fifth columnists. The unitary organism that the
Nazis called "World Jewry" never existed. This was part of the insanity of the
theory. It insisted that a merchant banker from Hamburg, a Talmudist from
Vilna, and a dock worker from Salonika were identical for all important
purposes. And it was part of the special horror of the Holocaust that everything
about its victims but the bare datum of their Jewishness was obliterated before
the actual living Jews, personal lives and family histories stripped away
with their clothing, were obliterated themselves.
This is the other problem with the concept of genocide. The Nazi world view
was fundamentally racist, and the essentialism built into that world view is
impossible to remove from its afterlife in the newly-minted crime of
genocide. It has merely been reversed. To the Nazis the SS were heroes and the
Jews sub-human vermin. In today's discourse the killers are killers, which is
usually fair enough; but the victims are granted a kind of plenary indulgence
and appear to us as helpless innocents. One can kill in self-defense and
wars are routinely fought between equally guilty parties. Only in situations of
genocide are good and evil so clearly drawn.
That moral clarity -- to use a Bushism that seems to have fallen from favor
-- is genocide's public relations strength, but it is the concept's undoing as
a tool of analysis. The price for that clarity is the same obliteration of
personal, family, and social history perpetrated by the Nazis. The victims
have no identity but their group membership.
For example, suggest some human sympathy towards _a Serb household in Kosovo_
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/628880.s tm) , and you're treated as
if you were Slobodan Milosevic himself. It is all but impossible to discuss
the possibility that _the 1994 plane crash which killed the then-president of
Rwanda_ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/694660.st m) and served as
the excuse for the slaughter there was the work of _Paul Kagame's Tutsi
rebels_ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/694660.st m) -- though some
students of the events believe that this was the case. It is just as difficult to
point to _the Rwandan army's later incursions into the Congo_
(http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaySto ry.cfm?story_id=3446358) _and its hold on
some of the area's mines_
(http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/kong idx.htm) . Having been victims of genocide, the sins of Kosovars and Tutsis both
past and present are washed as white as snow. The same is true of rebels in
Darfur after the savage repression licensed by the Sudanese government; only
now, and only in a few places, does one hear that not all of the atrocities
were the work of the Janjaweed.
We do not need a concept that simplifies political struggles beyond
recognition or gives preferential attention to those calamities where leaders of one
side happen to claim that their enemy is a specific ethnic, racial or
religious group. Lemkin and the UN were not to blame; none of this was likely to
have been foreseen in 1948. The notion of genocide emerged from an
understandable sense that Nazi crimes were somehow unlike the crimes of the past and
must never be repeated. But it remains too closely tied to those crimes, and to
a particular explanation of them, to be of any use in today's world. There
is no such thing as genocide. There are cruelty, oppression, murder, and
torture. Those are real, and they need to be stopped. Genocide is imaginary.
It is time we did away with it.
_Michael Steinberg_ (http://www.monthlyreview.org/tfoatw.htm) is the author
of _The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of
Capitalism_ (http://www.monthlyreview.org/tfoatw.htm) published this year by
Monthly Review Press and essays in professional journals in history, music, and
law. He is a member of the literature collective _Cat's out of the Bag._
(http://www.catsoutofthebag.com/) He and his wife _Loret_
(http://photography.rit.edu/faculty-work/pages/st einberg-1.html) , _a photographer and professor of
documentary photography_ (http://www.rit.edu/~lgfpph/work.html) , live in
Rochester, New York, under the supervision of two domestic medium-hair cats.
(http://www.catsoutofthebag.com/)
(javascript:HaloScanTB('steinberg080506');) (http://mrzine.org/)
(http://www.statcounter.com/) (http://www.statcounter.com/)
Monthly Review, VA
May 08, 06
by Michael Steinberg
In an age dominated by brute force and overwhelming military power -- in
other words, any age at all -- it is hard to remember that the simplest addition
to our vocabulary can change the world. This was what Raphael Lemkin
accomplished in 1944, when in a study on the Nazi occupation of Europe he coined
the word "genocide."
Just four years later, the concept entered international law in _the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide_
(http://www.ohchr.org/english/law/genocide.htm) , passed by the General Assembly of the
United Nations on December 9, 1948. That Convention gives the following
definition:
[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial or religious group,
as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (Article 2).
This makes "genocide" a peculiar type of crime. It is what lawyers call a
mens rea offense, one which encompasses a wide range of conduct whenever it is
done with a specific intention. Mass killing is what genocide calls to
mind, of course, but the prohibited acts include mass maiming, reducing the
living standards of people below the level needed to maintain the population,
forced sterilization and probably forced contraception, and the mandatory
surrender of parental rights.
Lawyers could go further. They know that "calculated" is a legal term of
art which refers to an objective standard of conduct. An act is calculated to
bring about a result if a reasonable person would know that the result was
likely to follow. Throwing someone overboard in the middle of Lake Superior is
calculated to kill the victim even if the person doing the throwing intends
nothing more than a harmless prank.
Put this way, there are a great many countries which have committed genocide.
Was apartheid not the imposition of serious mental harm on Black South
Africans, even those who never got in trouble with the police or the army? Didn't
_Canada_ (http://www.irsr-rqpi.gc.ca/english/historical_eve nts.html) take
First Nations children from their parents well into the twentieth century? How
about the 500,000 Iraqi children whose deaths due to _sanctions_
(http://www.commondreams.org/views/070700-103.htm ) was considered a price worth paying
by that gentle liberal _Madeleine Albright_
(http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084) ? And might not neoliberal "shock treatment" qualify under subhead
(c), considering that living standards in the former Soviet Union were brought
so low as a result that _the population declined dramatically_
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3984951.stm) ?
These are all highly debatable questions, of course, and I don't plan to
debate them. They're offered only to show that the specific definition of
genocide to which the world community adheres makes sense only within the context
of its birth. Genocide, as a crime, is a generalized description of Nazi
race policy. Each of the subheads was derived from a specific practice: (a)
from the death camps, (b) slave labor, (c) confinement in ghettos, (d) the
forced sterilization program, and (e) a little-known but real program to "rescue"
Aryan children from less suitable parents.
That's not all. Lemkin (or the UN) did more than allow the Nazis to define
the physical acts constituting genocide. In a way which is proving far more
troubling, they also let the Nazi paradigm define the other part of the
offense, the intent or mental state required. The new crime was limited to acts
intended to harm not specific, concrete human beings but "a national, ethnical
[sic], racial or religious group, as such." It is a crime which combines
violence with categorization. Given the breadth of the definition, in fact, it
is the categorization itself which stands at the heart of the offense.
Genocide is thus a crime of the imagination. It is harm with the belief
that every individual act of violence is a step towards the elimination of a
group. But this raises a question. Why does this intent convert murder into
something worse than murder?
The question is most horrifyingly pressing in contemporary Africa. The
victims in Darfur are described as Africans and the perpetrators as Arabs.
Genetically these two "groups" are identical, and there are reasons to believe that
the underlying conflict is one between farmers and pastoralists, but that is
irrelevant; what counts is the construction of group identity which allows
the killing and the burning of villages to be seen as the destruction of one
group by another. It is a murderous and largely -- though not entirely --
one-sided struggle, and it has produced hundreds of thousands of victims. The
heart-wrenching TV footage and the finger-pointing editorials may all be
merited. Yet while the "genocide" label makes Darfur the object of humanitarian
concern -- or at least the simulacrum of concern, aid budgets still not being
increased -- _the far vaster, longer, more horrendous slaughter in the Congo_
(http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/24/world/ main657774.shtml) goes on
with hardly a mention even on the inner pages of our newspapers of record. To
what point is one classified as genocide and the other as a mere civil war?
Is blood redder in Darfur?
Nor does the elimination of every sort of group fall within the definition of
genocide. In 1965 and 1966, for example, hundreds of thousands -- _perhaps
more than a million_ (http://www.frif.com/new2002/shap.html) -- people were
murdered in _Indonesia_ (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB52/) ,
mostly because of their real or rumored membership in the Communist Party.
Entire villages were wiped out. It was a slaughter that in its scope, its low-tech
brutality, and the resigned acquiescence of most of its victims seems an
eerie presage of Rwanda. But it was not genocide, because political groups are
not entitled to the protection of the convention. (Neither was _Stalin's
liquidation of the kulaks_ (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/coll.html) ,
because "social class" doesn't make the list either.) To hack a Communist to
pieces with a machete is only murder; to hack a Tutsi to death in the same way
is something else
And the mens rea of genocide is also a delusion, a delusion which seems to
have the power of contagion. Its almost inevitable failure is not due to the
technical difficulty of killing large numbers of people. It is the group
itself which slips away. Individuals may or may not escape; but the boundaries
of the category are certain to blur. The problem with the concept of
genocide is that, like the crime itself, it insists that things are otherwise.
Categories are always artificial, provisional, inaccurate, misleading. You
can group people any way you wish, but nothing will assure you that every
person so categorized will act the same as any other or that those uncategorized
will not turn out to be fifth columnists. The unitary organism that the
Nazis called "World Jewry" never existed. This was part of the insanity of the
theory. It insisted that a merchant banker from Hamburg, a Talmudist from
Vilna, and a dock worker from Salonika were identical for all important
purposes. And it was part of the special horror of the Holocaust that everything
about its victims but the bare datum of their Jewishness was obliterated before
the actual living Jews, personal lives and family histories stripped away
with their clothing, were obliterated themselves.
This is the other problem with the concept of genocide. The Nazi world view
was fundamentally racist, and the essentialism built into that world view is
impossible to remove from its afterlife in the newly-minted crime of
genocide. It has merely been reversed. To the Nazis the SS were heroes and the
Jews sub-human vermin. In today's discourse the killers are killers, which is
usually fair enough; but the victims are granted a kind of plenary indulgence
and appear to us as helpless innocents. One can kill in self-defense and
wars are routinely fought between equally guilty parties. Only in situations of
genocide are good and evil so clearly drawn.
That moral clarity -- to use a Bushism that seems to have fallen from favor
-- is genocide's public relations strength, but it is the concept's undoing as
a tool of analysis. The price for that clarity is the same obliteration of
personal, family, and social history perpetrated by the Nazis. The victims
have no identity but their group membership.
For example, suggest some human sympathy towards _a Serb household in Kosovo_
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/628880.s tm) , and you're treated as
if you were Slobodan Milosevic himself. It is all but impossible to discuss
the possibility that _the 1994 plane crash which killed the then-president of
Rwanda_ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/694660.st m) and served as
the excuse for the slaughter there was the work of _Paul Kagame's Tutsi
rebels_ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/694660.st m) -- though some
students of the events believe that this was the case. It is just as difficult to
point to _the Rwandan army's later incursions into the Congo_
(http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaySto ry.cfm?story_id=3446358) _and its hold on
some of the area's mines_
(http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/kong idx.htm) . Having been victims of genocide, the sins of Kosovars and Tutsis both
past and present are washed as white as snow. The same is true of rebels in
Darfur after the savage repression licensed by the Sudanese government; only
now, and only in a few places, does one hear that not all of the atrocities
were the work of the Janjaweed.
We do not need a concept that simplifies political struggles beyond
recognition or gives preferential attention to those calamities where leaders of one
side happen to claim that their enemy is a specific ethnic, racial or
religious group. Lemkin and the UN were not to blame; none of this was likely to
have been foreseen in 1948. The notion of genocide emerged from an
understandable sense that Nazi crimes were somehow unlike the crimes of the past and
must never be repeated. But it remains too closely tied to those crimes, and to
a particular explanation of them, to be of any use in today's world. There
is no such thing as genocide. There are cruelty, oppression, murder, and
torture. Those are real, and they need to be stopped. Genocide is imaginary.
It is time we did away with it.
_Michael Steinberg_ (http://www.monthlyreview.org/tfoatw.htm) is the author
of _The Fiction of a Thinkable World: Body, Meaning, and the Culture of
Capitalism_ (http://www.monthlyreview.org/tfoatw.htm) published this year by
Monthly Review Press and essays in professional journals in history, music, and
law. He is a member of the literature collective _Cat's out of the Bag._
(http://www.catsoutofthebag.com/) He and his wife _Loret_
(http://photography.rit.edu/faculty-work/pages/st einberg-1.html) , _a photographer and professor of
documentary photography_ (http://www.rit.edu/~lgfpph/work.html) , live in
Rochester, New York, under the supervision of two domestic medium-hair cats.
(http://www.catsoutofthebag.com/)
(javascript:HaloScanTB('steinberg080506');) (http://mrzine.org/)
(http://www.statcounter.com/) (http://www.statcounter.com/)