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The National Post, Canada
May 2 2014
The politics of genocide
Jonathan Kay | May 2, 2014
Spring is a season for black memories. April 24 marked the beginning
of the Armenian Genocide in 1915. April 27 was Yom HaShoah, a day for
Holocaust remembrance. The Rwandan Genocide, in which Hutu extremists
slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, took place from April 7
to July 1994, a 100-day spasm of extermination that generated an
average of 8,000 victims, or one whole Srebrenica massacre, every
single day.
The term "genocide" was created by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. He intended
the word "to signify a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming
at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national
groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves."
ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty ImagesAn Australian UN soldier carries a Hutu
orphan child whose mother was killed at the Kibeho camp in
southwestern Rwanda.
Not surprisingly, activists and legal scholars have been arguing about
the meaning of "plan" and "national groups" ever since.
Among Western scholars, for instance, the Turks' mass murder of more
than one million Armenians in 1915 is viewed as one of the great
genocides of the 20th century. But to this day, many Turks insist
otherwise.
When I wrote about the subject this week, a Canadian university
professor of Turkish background admonished me for my "one-sided moral
lecture," and declared "many historians dispute Armenian claims. No
court has ever ruled that this was indeed a case of genocide ...
Millions perished in [the dying days of the Ottoman Empire] not just
Armenians, but many others, Turks, Kurds, Muslims. Is it consistent
with Canadian values ... to single out only one ethnic group's loss?"
Apparently, it is: Canada is one of 21 nations that have officially
recognized the Armenian Genocide. And last weekend, at an Armenian
memorial event in Toronto, federal Multiculturalism Minister Jason
Kenney got a huge ovation when he declared the Canadian Museum of
Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg would feature a permanent exhibit
devoted to the 1915 slaughter known to Armenians as Medz Yeghern.
Another speaker was former Toronto-area Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis,
who spoke angrily about the pro-Turkish protestors who threatened to
shout down an Armenian Genocide-commemoration ceremony in Ottawa he
helped lead last week.
"The presence of the Turks here shows their shame is all over them,
otherwise they wouldn't be here," he said in Ottawa. "What brainless
idiot let them assemble here? I'm deeply disturbed by the presence of
antagonists like this on Parliament Hill."
AFP / Documentation Centre of CambodiaThis handout photograph released
by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-CAM) on August 9, 2012
shows newly discovered photographs of former prisoners at the
notorious S-21 torture prison in the late 1970s, in Phnom Penh.
Police kept the pro-Armenian and pro-Turkish crowds separate, so there
was no violence. But Mr. Karygiannis' angry tone points to an awkward
fact about genocide commemoration: Although these events and exhibits
are supposed to arouse a universalist appreciation of the need for
tolerance, they also inevitably lead to vicious historical debates
that actually exacerbate group animosities.
In other cases, the official commemoration of mass exterminations can
encourage ethnic groups to fight for prominence as victims of history.
Some Canadian Ukrainians, for instance, complain to me about the
relative prominence of the Jewish Holocaust over other genocides --
especially the Ukrainians who starved to death in the man-made Soviet
famine of the early 1930s, known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor.
Related
Canada's human rights museum was meant as a unifying force, but, so
far, has only inspired criticism
Jonathan Kay: Turkey must accept the truth about the Armenian Genocide
'Indian Residential Schools' or 'Settler Colonial Genocide'? Native
group slams human rights museum over exhibit wording
Matiossian & Whitehorn: The Anne Frank of the Armenian Genocide
"The CMHR must contain a permanent and prominent gallery dedicated to
the Holodomor and a permanent and prominent exhibit dedicated to the
WW1 Internment Operations," the Ukrainian Canadian Congress declared
last year, after its members were given a tour of the facility.
"The planned portrayal of these two tragic human rights stories at the
CMHR is insulting to human rights education and to the Ukrainian
Canadian community. The Holodomor is represented on a panel buried in
the back of a small gallery outside the washroom in the museum and the
WW1 Internment is represented by a non-descript picture on the wall of
another gallery."
SJOBERG/AFP/Getty ImagesThe young Khmer Rouge guerrilla soldiers carry
mortar shells April 17, 1975 as they enter Phnom Penh, the day
Cambodia fell under the control of the Communist Khmer Rouge forces.
Jews also can get picky about the exact way in which the Holocaust is
described. During a recent visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's official
Holocaust memorial and museum, I heard a guide lecture visitors in
great detail about how the Holocaust was a singular act of evil that
should not be lumped in as a generic manifestation of "man's
inhumanity to man."
Yet it is exactly this idea -- the Holocaust must be treated as the
gold standard of epic human malignancy -- that sometimes rankles
activists from other groups: As many as 7.5 million Ukrainians starved
to death in the Holodomor, a number comparable to the Holocaust. Most
were peasants: Whole families died together, starving parents with
their starving children under conditions of unimaginable anguish
similar to those in the Warsaw ghetto. So why does every educated
Western person know the word Holocaust, while few know anything about
the Holodomor?
The same question applies to the Cambodian Genocide, one of the most
arithmetically successful acts of mass slaughter in human history. In
a country that had a population of about seven million in 1975, Pol
Pot exterminated, either directly or indirectly, as many as three
million. Even if the lower, oft-cited figure of 1.7 million is used,
this still amounts to roughly 25% of the population.
March of the Living CanadaA Canadian student tours Auschwitz, the
former Nazi concentration camp.
In their lunatic campaign to transform the nation into a giant rural
labour collective, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities; snatched
children from parents; turned farms into government-run slave camps;
and annihilated anyone who spoke a foreign language, ran a school,
owned a shop, wore glasses, or betrayed any other sign of education or
status -- filling 20,000 mass graves in the process.
Paula Bronstein/ Getty ImagesSome of the 8,000 human skulls sit in a
glass case at the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center in Phnom Penh province.
And yet, to this day, scholars argue about whether Pol Pot was a true
génocidiaire; and his atrocities generate only a fraction of the
attention paid to other crimes against humanity.
The best explanation for this relates to motive. The original sins of
Western civilization are slavery, colonialism and racism -- and so we
are conditioned, through guilt and civilizational self-reflection, to
condemn any act of slaughter that seems animated by racial hate and
bigotry.
But Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge did not construct their campaign of
extermination along ethnic or religious lines: Their pogroms were
waged against a bizarre hodge-podge of perceived enemies: "saboteurs,"
intellectuals, rebels, capitalists. Some ethnic groups did worse than
others, the Cham minority, for instance. But as historian David
Chandler noted, the Cham "weren't mowed down because they were Cham.
They were mowed down because they resisted."
AP Photo/FileAn undated image shows the main gate of the Nazi
concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland. Writing over the gate reads:
"Arbeit macht frei" (Work Sets You Free).
>From a purely arithmetic point of view, it seems strange to me such
fine points should make a difference: During the 20th century,
totalitarian communism was at least as murderous as Nazism. But
because communism always has presented itself as a universal creed
aimed at perfecting human society, it usually is not spoken of in the
same breath as its fascist cousin.
Yes, Stalin deliberately killed at least six million people -- even
aside from the many millions of others who died as the predictable
result of his industrial policies. But many Western intellectuals of
the 1930s, dazzled by the Marxist dream, averted their eyes. (Some
still do.) Likewise, Pol Pot's horrific Maoist-Leninist regime in the
1970s also does not fit neatly into the racist Holocaust paradigm even
if, in the end, it all came to the same pile of skulls.
In a recent New York Review of Books article on the movies of
French-Cambodian documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh, Richard Bernstein
succinctly described the Khmer Rouge creed as one of "homicidal
radicalism" and "purifying inhumanity." He relates a disturbing
interview, conducted by Mr. Panh in his 2003 film S21: The Khmer Rouge
Killing Machine, of a former Cambodian camp guard named Prak Kanh. In
one scene, Kanh describes how he tortured Nay Nan, a random teenage
peasant who had been taken to the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, on the
paranoid pretext that she was a foreign spy.
"Kahn instructed Nay Nan in the form [her] confession had to take,"
Mr. Bernstein writes. "It had to be like a story, he told her, and it
had to include the enemy network that she had belonged to and the
names of its leaders. So Nay Nan, who worked at a Khmer Rouge
hospital, duly confessed to having defecated on the hospital's supply
of rice and on its operating table in order to embarrass the
hospital's leaders [under orders of the Central Intelligence Agency].
The young woman, who was 19 years old and virtually illiterate, was
taken to [a mass grave] and executed."
Stories like this show how pointless it is to debate the question of
how many corpses must dance on the head of a pin for a slaughter to be
deemed a "true" genocide: In Nay Nan's final seconds on this planet,
was there any consolation in the fact her killers were ideologues, not
racists -- mere pawns of madmen who thought they were building a
worker's paradise on a foundation of bones? Did the Armenians who died
clutching their babies in the Ottoman hinterlands suffer any less
because Kurds and Turks were dying in other parts of the empire?
And herein lies the great paradox of memorializing genocides qua
genocides: The whole exercise always is cast as one conducted for the
victims and their suffering. Yet by agonizing and fighting over the
semantics of genocide, we systematically ignore the way these victims
actually die: as individuals full of individual grief and pain and
love and loss. Everything else is arid semantics.
National Post
* Email: [email protected]
Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and
a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington,
D.C.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/05/02/jonathan-kay-the-politics-of-genocide/
May 2 2014
The politics of genocide
Jonathan Kay | May 2, 2014
Spring is a season for black memories. April 24 marked the beginning
of the Armenian Genocide in 1915. April 27 was Yom HaShoah, a day for
Holocaust remembrance. The Rwandan Genocide, in which Hutu extremists
slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, took place from April 7
to July 1994, a 100-day spasm of extermination that generated an
average of 8,000 victims, or one whole Srebrenica massacre, every
single day.
The term "genocide" was created by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. He intended
the word "to signify a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming
at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national
groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves."
ALEXANDER JOE/AFP/Getty ImagesAn Australian UN soldier carries a Hutu
orphan child whose mother was killed at the Kibeho camp in
southwestern Rwanda.
Not surprisingly, activists and legal scholars have been arguing about
the meaning of "plan" and "national groups" ever since.
Among Western scholars, for instance, the Turks' mass murder of more
than one million Armenians in 1915 is viewed as one of the great
genocides of the 20th century. But to this day, many Turks insist
otherwise.
When I wrote about the subject this week, a Canadian university
professor of Turkish background admonished me for my "one-sided moral
lecture," and declared "many historians dispute Armenian claims. No
court has ever ruled that this was indeed a case of genocide ...
Millions perished in [the dying days of the Ottoman Empire] not just
Armenians, but many others, Turks, Kurds, Muslims. Is it consistent
with Canadian values ... to single out only one ethnic group's loss?"
Apparently, it is: Canada is one of 21 nations that have officially
recognized the Armenian Genocide. And last weekend, at an Armenian
memorial event in Toronto, federal Multiculturalism Minister Jason
Kenney got a huge ovation when he declared the Canadian Museum of
Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg would feature a permanent exhibit
devoted to the 1915 slaughter known to Armenians as Medz Yeghern.
Another speaker was former Toronto-area Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis,
who spoke angrily about the pro-Turkish protestors who threatened to
shout down an Armenian Genocide-commemoration ceremony in Ottawa he
helped lead last week.
"The presence of the Turks here shows their shame is all over them,
otherwise they wouldn't be here," he said in Ottawa. "What brainless
idiot let them assemble here? I'm deeply disturbed by the presence of
antagonists like this on Parliament Hill."
AFP / Documentation Centre of CambodiaThis handout photograph released
by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-CAM) on August 9, 2012
shows newly discovered photographs of former prisoners at the
notorious S-21 torture prison in the late 1970s, in Phnom Penh.
Police kept the pro-Armenian and pro-Turkish crowds separate, so there
was no violence. But Mr. Karygiannis' angry tone points to an awkward
fact about genocide commemoration: Although these events and exhibits
are supposed to arouse a universalist appreciation of the need for
tolerance, they also inevitably lead to vicious historical debates
that actually exacerbate group animosities.
In other cases, the official commemoration of mass exterminations can
encourage ethnic groups to fight for prominence as victims of history.
Some Canadian Ukrainians, for instance, complain to me about the
relative prominence of the Jewish Holocaust over other genocides --
especially the Ukrainians who starved to death in the man-made Soviet
famine of the early 1930s, known to Ukrainians as the Holodomor.
Related
Canada's human rights museum was meant as a unifying force, but, so
far, has only inspired criticism
Jonathan Kay: Turkey must accept the truth about the Armenian Genocide
'Indian Residential Schools' or 'Settler Colonial Genocide'? Native
group slams human rights museum over exhibit wording
Matiossian & Whitehorn: The Anne Frank of the Armenian Genocide
"The CMHR must contain a permanent and prominent gallery dedicated to
the Holodomor and a permanent and prominent exhibit dedicated to the
WW1 Internment Operations," the Ukrainian Canadian Congress declared
last year, after its members were given a tour of the facility.
"The planned portrayal of these two tragic human rights stories at the
CMHR is insulting to human rights education and to the Ukrainian
Canadian community. The Holodomor is represented on a panel buried in
the back of a small gallery outside the washroom in the museum and the
WW1 Internment is represented by a non-descript picture on the wall of
another gallery."
SJOBERG/AFP/Getty ImagesThe young Khmer Rouge guerrilla soldiers carry
mortar shells April 17, 1975 as they enter Phnom Penh, the day
Cambodia fell under the control of the Communist Khmer Rouge forces.
Jews also can get picky about the exact way in which the Holocaust is
described. During a recent visit to Yad Vashem, Israel's official
Holocaust memorial and museum, I heard a guide lecture visitors in
great detail about how the Holocaust was a singular act of evil that
should not be lumped in as a generic manifestation of "man's
inhumanity to man."
Yet it is exactly this idea -- the Holocaust must be treated as the
gold standard of epic human malignancy -- that sometimes rankles
activists from other groups: As many as 7.5 million Ukrainians starved
to death in the Holodomor, a number comparable to the Holocaust. Most
were peasants: Whole families died together, starving parents with
their starving children under conditions of unimaginable anguish
similar to those in the Warsaw ghetto. So why does every educated
Western person know the word Holocaust, while few know anything about
the Holodomor?
The same question applies to the Cambodian Genocide, one of the most
arithmetically successful acts of mass slaughter in human history. In
a country that had a population of about seven million in 1975, Pol
Pot exterminated, either directly or indirectly, as many as three
million. Even if the lower, oft-cited figure of 1.7 million is used,
this still amounts to roughly 25% of the population.
March of the Living CanadaA Canadian student tours Auschwitz, the
former Nazi concentration camp.
In their lunatic campaign to transform the nation into a giant rural
labour collective, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities; snatched
children from parents; turned farms into government-run slave camps;
and annihilated anyone who spoke a foreign language, ran a school,
owned a shop, wore glasses, or betrayed any other sign of education or
status -- filling 20,000 mass graves in the process.
Paula Bronstein/ Getty ImagesSome of the 8,000 human skulls sit in a
glass case at the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center in Phnom Penh province.
And yet, to this day, scholars argue about whether Pol Pot was a true
génocidiaire; and his atrocities generate only a fraction of the
attention paid to other crimes against humanity.
The best explanation for this relates to motive. The original sins of
Western civilization are slavery, colonialism and racism -- and so we
are conditioned, through guilt and civilizational self-reflection, to
condemn any act of slaughter that seems animated by racial hate and
bigotry.
But Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge did not construct their campaign of
extermination along ethnic or religious lines: Their pogroms were
waged against a bizarre hodge-podge of perceived enemies: "saboteurs,"
intellectuals, rebels, capitalists. Some ethnic groups did worse than
others, the Cham minority, for instance. But as historian David
Chandler noted, the Cham "weren't mowed down because they were Cham.
They were mowed down because they resisted."
AP Photo/FileAn undated image shows the main gate of the Nazi
concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland. Writing over the gate reads:
"Arbeit macht frei" (Work Sets You Free).
>From a purely arithmetic point of view, it seems strange to me such
fine points should make a difference: During the 20th century,
totalitarian communism was at least as murderous as Nazism. But
because communism always has presented itself as a universal creed
aimed at perfecting human society, it usually is not spoken of in the
same breath as its fascist cousin.
Yes, Stalin deliberately killed at least six million people -- even
aside from the many millions of others who died as the predictable
result of his industrial policies. But many Western intellectuals of
the 1930s, dazzled by the Marxist dream, averted their eyes. (Some
still do.) Likewise, Pol Pot's horrific Maoist-Leninist regime in the
1970s also does not fit neatly into the racist Holocaust paradigm even
if, in the end, it all came to the same pile of skulls.
In a recent New York Review of Books article on the movies of
French-Cambodian documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh, Richard Bernstein
succinctly described the Khmer Rouge creed as one of "homicidal
radicalism" and "purifying inhumanity." He relates a disturbing
interview, conducted by Mr. Panh in his 2003 film S21: The Khmer Rouge
Killing Machine, of a former Cambodian camp guard named Prak Kanh. In
one scene, Kanh describes how he tortured Nay Nan, a random teenage
peasant who had been taken to the infamous Tuol Sleng prison, on the
paranoid pretext that she was a foreign spy.
"Kahn instructed Nay Nan in the form [her] confession had to take,"
Mr. Bernstein writes. "It had to be like a story, he told her, and it
had to include the enemy network that she had belonged to and the
names of its leaders. So Nay Nan, who worked at a Khmer Rouge
hospital, duly confessed to having defecated on the hospital's supply
of rice and on its operating table in order to embarrass the
hospital's leaders [under orders of the Central Intelligence Agency].
The young woman, who was 19 years old and virtually illiterate, was
taken to [a mass grave] and executed."
Stories like this show how pointless it is to debate the question of
how many corpses must dance on the head of a pin for a slaughter to be
deemed a "true" genocide: In Nay Nan's final seconds on this planet,
was there any consolation in the fact her killers were ideologues, not
racists -- mere pawns of madmen who thought they were building a
worker's paradise on a foundation of bones? Did the Armenians who died
clutching their babies in the Ottoman hinterlands suffer any less
because Kurds and Turks were dying in other parts of the empire?
And herein lies the great paradox of memorializing genocides qua
genocides: The whole exercise always is cast as one conducted for the
victims and their suffering. Yet by agonizing and fighting over the
semantics of genocide, we systematically ignore the way these victims
actually die: as individuals full of individual grief and pain and
love and loss. Everything else is arid semantics.
National Post
* Email: [email protected]
Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and
a Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington,
D.C.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/05/02/jonathan-kay-the-politics-of-genocide/