Genocide – OpEd
The struggle to control the term “genocide” has become a contested conceptual space, turning cautionary lessons in how bad we can be into disputes over just how bad things really were.
By David B. Kanin
One of Thomas Jefferson’s most often cited maxims was that “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” Jefferson urged a new world to avoid the inherited aristocratic structures and incessant warfare that he believed kept the old one’s tyrannical systems in place and held back human progress. Living at the cusp of the nationalist era, he did not have to consider the soon-to-be constructed rivalries of national memories and atrocities – the latter witnessed, recorded, and catalogued – which have ensured that in our current world the dead often have as much purchase as the living.
The Third Reich, with its afterlife in law, entertainment, and the mass media that never seems to end, has reinforced this condition. As points of comparison, “Hitler” and “Nazi” have become clichés called into use when someone is of a mind to put someone else in the worst light possible. Similarly, genocide” has become a blanket epithet used to vilify (often enemy) perpetrators; it also serves as a slogan helping to pay homage to murdered (often co-national) victims. After World War II genocide gained legal status, and certainly stands as a criminal category used by human rights activists and a burgeoning international prosecutorial system dedicated to preventing horrors, if possible, and to enforcing justice, if not. However, the mixture of this concept with rival communal memories, nationalism, and traditional categories of diplomacy and power politics does some harm even while the legal process attempts to do some good.
The problem is that – reasonably enough – many who have suffered through the murder of loved ones in the context of mass slaughter are not satisfied to have these horrors classified as anything but genocide. It is not enough to speak of mass murder, “crimes against humanity” (another legal neologism), or anything else connoting something less than the superlative category in the class of the worst possible human activities. Any effort to demote horrific events to something less than genocide becomes a new crime against the survivors and the loved ones of those who did not survive.....
Read the original article here :Genocide – OpEd
By David B. Kanin
One of Thomas Jefferson’s most often cited maxims was that “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” Jefferson urged a new world to avoid the inherited aristocratic structures and incessant warfare that he believed kept the old one’s tyrannical systems in place and held back human progress. Living at the cusp of the nationalist era, he did not have to consider the soon-to-be constructed rivalries of national memories and atrocities – the latter witnessed, recorded, and catalogued – which have ensured that in our current world the dead often have as much purchase as the living.
The Third Reich, with its afterlife in law, entertainment, and the mass media that never seems to end, has reinforced this condition. As points of comparison, “Hitler” and “Nazi” have become clichés called into use when someone is of a mind to put someone else in the worst light possible. Similarly, genocide” has become a blanket epithet used to vilify (often enemy) perpetrators; it also serves as a slogan helping to pay homage to murdered (often co-national) victims. After World War II genocide gained legal status, and certainly stands as a criminal category used by human rights activists and a burgeoning international prosecutorial system dedicated to preventing horrors, if possible, and to enforcing justice, if not. However, the mixture of this concept with rival communal memories, nationalism, and traditional categories of diplomacy and power politics does some harm even while the legal process attempts to do some good.
The problem is that – reasonably enough – many who have suffered through the murder of loved ones in the context of mass slaughter are not satisfied to have these horrors classified as anything but genocide. It is not enough to speak of mass murder, “crimes against humanity” (another legal neologism), or anything else connoting something less than the superlative category in the class of the worst possible human activities. Any effort to demote horrific events to something less than genocide becomes a new crime against the survivors and the loved ones of those who did not survive.....
Read the original article here :Genocide – OpEd
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