Genocide

Genocide is a violent process that aims at the liquidation of protected groups. Like individuals, groups can be killed in a variety of ways and for many different reasons. Only the intention of the perpetrator distinguishes genocide from other forms of mass violence. The implications of the account given are striking. Genocide is not in any sense distinctively heinous. Nor is it necessarily immoral. Under certain conditions, settlercolonialism, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation will count as instances of the phenomenon. While (...) the argument undermines the orthodox view, it can accommodate the idea that the Holocaust was distinctively heinous. (shrink)

After placing the issue of holding international institutional agents responsible within a theoretical context, this article takes up the case of the UN's role in the Rwandan genocide. Through an examination of the extensive literature that deals either directly or incidentally with the UN's role and responsibility during the period prior to the outbreak of mass killing on 6 April 1994, this essay tests a slightly modified version of Toni Erskine's theory of why international institutional agents can be held responsible (...) for their actions. The article details the various ways that different parts of the UN have been held responsible for failing to prevent and mitigate the genocide. Moreover, it documents specific failures in four different categories: failures in communication, deliberation, decision-making, and implementation. The article concludes that the extensive literature on the Rwandan genocide conforms to a slightly modified version of the Erskine model. It also suggests that practical, functional reforms – which are far easier to implement than structural reforms – can be initiated based on that model. (shrink)

Amidst the cacophony of claims made about forgiveness, this book serves to aid in an effort to put żforgiveness in perspective.ż Marieke Smit and Christopher ...

The category of « postmemory » has been invoked by Marianne Hirsch to refer to a traumatic past which is not directly remembered in first person, but is handed down to later generations and is recalled through the mediation of narratives and images which become “prostheses” for a lack of direct memory. But how is it that these prosthetic recollections do not simply substitute for what lacks but seem to shape the very events they are meant to reproduce ? How (...) come an event continues to haunt the memories of the present, even when no immediate remembrance of it is left ? How to think of an “afterimage” of something that was never seen in the first place? It is only quite recently that the role of prosthetic images has been more widely acknowledged in the construction and creation of memories of collective trauma. The paper will focus on the role of photographic images played in remembrance of the Armenian genocide. It shall be shown how the few pictures that were taken by witnesses of the deportations had an afterlife of their own, being reframed and receiving specific interpretations. In particular, the paper will discuss the case of Armin T. Wegner, a German voluntary serving as Sanitary Officer in the Turkish army who, during his fieldwork in 1915/16 in Anatolia and on the Euphrates in Syria, documented the final stages of deportation, taking pictures of the camps at the desert’s fringes. His photos, which are among the most important visual testimonies of the extermination, only belatedly later made Wegner aware of what he had been witnessing, turning him into a witness après coup and to a defender of the Armenian cause. (shrink)

In recent years, the claim of the unrepresentability of the Shoah has stirred vivid debates, especially following the strong positions taken by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann and author of Shoah (1986). This claim of unrepresentability, it can be shown, draws part of its attraction from the fact that it oscillates undecidedly between a claim of logical impossibility (“the Shoah can’t be represented”) and a normative demand (“the Shoah shouldn’t be represented”). This essay analyzes the argumentative structure of the advocates (...) of the unrepresentability and shows why the often made connection to Kant is flawed. Although his Critique of the Power of Judgment affirms indeed that the prohibition of representation is the “perhaps most sublime passage in the Jewish Law”, turning the prohibition of representation into a supposedly Kantian claim does not hold grounds. The essay reconstructs the political framework of the debate, situates the Kantian passage in its precise philosophical context and then successively assesses the main arguments put forward by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and Georges Didi-Huberman in their critique of Lanzmann’s categorical imperative. While showing why the rhetoric of the “unrepresentable” bear troubling structural analogies to what they want to fight (i.e. the politics of erasure, which always also include the erasure of the traces of erasure), a certain notion of the “unrepresentable” is rescued nevertheless at the end of the essay. Representation, so it is argued by returning to a Kantian distinction, is not a matter of Kanon, but a matter of Organon, which then puts the debate about the Sublime (which took place between Lyotard and Rancière in the 90’s) into a new perspective. (shrink)

Genocide and crimes against humanity are among the core crimes of international law, but they also carry great moral resonance due to their indissoluble link to the atrocities of the Nazi regime and to other egregious episodes of mass violence. However, the concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity are not well understood, even by the international lawyers and jurists who are most concerned with them. A conceptual fog hovers around the discussion of these two categories of crime. In this (...) paper, I draw a number of distinctions aimed at clarifying the concepts. I distinguish three concepts of genocide, two legal and one moral, and two concepts of crimes against humanity, a legal and a moral one. I criticize the current legal concept of genocide and, using the idea of discrimination, propose a model for developing a more adequate legal concept and for better understanding the moral concept. I also criticize the moral concept of crimes against humanity, which many thinkers have conflated with the legal concept of such crimes. (shrink)

1989 was described as 'annus mirabilis', and its peaceful revolutions hailed as one of the great moments in human history. In subsequent years, the re-emergence of war, genocide and terror led to re-interpretation: Europe became a dark continent, the 20th century its darkest hour. Was 1989 merely a bright moment in a sea of violence?This contribution acknowledges European war, genocide and terror and examines in some detail the contribution of this history to the peaceful revolutions of 1989. It is argued (...) that horrific violence - Stalinist terror, World War II, the Cold War as well as genocide, ethnic cleansing and deportation - resulted in a legacy that contributed to the revolutions of 1989 in the following ways:- Stalinist terror resulted in the persistent illegitimacy of relations of domination, which ultimately resulted in a structural stasis leading to the breakdown of the Soviet empire;- The global Cold War integrated the Soviet project in the world order and provided its raison d'etre but its winding down provided the opportunity to peacefully overcome the Soviet legacy;- Yalta, ethnic cleansing and Soviet 'nationality policies' resulted in diligent determination to build independent states - beyond 1989.In view of this legacy the revolutions of 1989 are re-assessed for their significance. It is argued that the negotiated revolutions were more than a utopian moment as they provide a model of large-scale and rapid transition that is not marred by violence. To be sure, only a select number of countries underwent a negotiated revolution, but this was not limited to Central Europe. The true and lasting global significance of 1989 is that it provides clear-cut alternatives of organising synchronised political and social change in the 21st century. Contrary to received historical wisdom, revolutions may in future be the non-violent means of organising large-scale and rapid change, if negotiated. (shrink)

This article is the first to propose a test for defining incitement to genocide and, especially, for distinguishing it from hate speech. As courts have decided the world's first cases on incitement to genocide in the last decade, they have sometimes diverged alarmingly, as when a Canadian federal court described a speech as an oration on "elections, courage, and love" and then the Canadian Supreme Court identified it as incitement to genocide.Without a reliable distinction, a mere racist could be convicted (...) of a crime tantamount to genocide, and speech might be unduly and dangerously restricted. Incitement to genocide demands keen attention for another reason, also: it is a precursor to genocide, and may be a prerequisite for it. Political leaders in Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and other pre-genocidal societies prepared civilian populations to condone genocide, by using certain techniques to make mass killing seem first acceptable, and then necessary. This article describes those techniques, and includes them in a new six-prong model for incitement to genocide. The article also proposes a key distinction between incitement to genocide and hate speech: that anyone can commit hate speech, but a speaker must have influence or authority over the audience, to be able to commit incitement to genocide. Such authority need not be de jure, as demonstrated by the case of the Rwandan pop star Simon Bikindi, whose songs were played incessantly during the 1994 genocide, and who is now a defendant at the Rwanda war crimes tribunal. (shrink)

: On February 22, 2001, three Bosnian Serb soldiers were found guilty of crimes against humanity. Their offense? Rape. This is the first time that rape has been prosecuted and condemned as a crime against humanity. Appealing to Jacques Derrida's democracy of the perhaps and Judith Butler's politics of performative contradiction, I see this judgment inaugurating a politics of the vulnerable body which challenges current understandings of evil, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

In Ender's Game and Philosophy: Genocide is Child's Play, twenty-eight philosophers explore the fascinating issues raised in Orson Scott Card's popular and controversial novel Ender's Game, and its sequels, which have been discovered and rediscovered by generations of fans. Card's stories highlight the violence and cruelty of children, the role of empathy and failure of communication in war, the military manipulation of people by disinformation, and the balance of individual dignity with the social good.

Two trips to Auschwitz provide a context for reflection on fundamental issues in civic and moral education. Custodians of the Auschwitz historical site are currently aware of its responsibility to humanity to educate about the genocide against the Jews, as a morally distinct element in its presentation of Nazi crimes at Auschwitz. Prior to the fall of Communism in 1989, the site's message was dominated by a misleading civic narrative about Polish victimization by, and resistance to, Naziism. In this article, (...) I discuss the attempts of many Polish intellectuals during the past twenty-five years to engage in an honest and difficult civic project of facing up to their history, as it is entwined with anti-Semitism, with the centuries-long presence of Jews in Poland, and with their current absence. An interaction with a tour guide who took me to be criticizing Poles for their failure to help Jews during the Holocaust prompts further reflections on the difficulties of grasping the moral enormity of genocide, on the dangers of stereotyping, on the conditions under which it is appropriate to proffer and to withhold well-founded moral judgements, and on the moral importance of appropriate feelings and attitudes when moral action is extraordinarily risky or dangerous. (shrink)

v. 1. Exterminative medicine in Nazi Germany and contemporary America -- v. 2. The language of exterminative medicine in Nazi Germany and contemporary America.

The history of ideas and contemporary genocide studies conjointly suggests a meaningful secular conception of evil. I will show how the history of ideas supplies us with a cumulative pattern, or an eventual gestalt, of the sought-for conception of universal secular evil. This gestalt is a result of my examination of the history of ideas. The historical analysis of evil firmly grounds my research in the tradition of philosophical inquiry, where I shift the focus from the problem of evil, which (...) is indebted to theological discourse, to an analysis of the concept of evil. Next, I show how this gestalt applies to genocide studies. Specifically, I show how a secular concept of evil meaningfully functions in this research program. The examination of genocide studies serves as a test-bed for the fruit of my historical examination. There, I show, first, in what way a secular notion of evil is irreducible, or elementary; second, how the concept used in genocide studies compares to the cumulative historical pattern; and third, in what way genocide studies have progressively enriched the pattern. Armed with these results, I then engage with the contemporary literature that criticizes the possibility of a meaningful concept of evil, and attempts to reduce this notion of secular evil to relativistic particulars. Here, I describe relevant arguments and objections. It is interesting to explore whether, and if so, how, some aspects of the objections may lend themselves to an actual refinement of the concept of evil. Finally, then, I present a summary account of evil on the basis of my findings. (shrink)

In this contribution to philosophical ethics, Claudia Card revisits the theory of evil developed in her earlier book The Atrocity Paradigm, and expands it to consider collectively perpetrated and collectively suffered atrocities. Redefining evil as a secular concept and focusing on the inexcusability - rather than the culpability - of atrocities, Card examines the tension between responding to evils and preserving humanitarian values. This stimulating and often provocative book contends that understanding the evils in terrorism, torture and genocide enables us (...) to recognise similar evils in everyday life: daily life under oppressive regimes and in racist environments; violence against women, including in the home; violence and executions in prisons; hate crimes; and violence against animals. Card analyses torture, terrorism and genocide in the light of recent atrocities, considering whether there can be moral justifications for terrorism and torture, and providing conceptual tools to distinguish genocide from non-genocidal mass slaughter. (shrink)

: Social death, central to the evil of genocide (whether the genocide is homicidal or primarily cultural), distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

Social death, central to the evil of genocide, distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Is hatred a necessarily evil? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there evils we should tolerate? What can make evils hard to recognize? Are evils inevitable? How can we best respond to and live with evils? Claudia Card offers a secular theory of evil that responds to these questions and more. Evils, according to her theory, have two fundamental components. One component is reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm -- harm that makes a life indecent and impossible (...) or that makes a death indecent. The other component is culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war rape, torture, and severe child abuse, are Card's paradigms because in them these key elements are writ large. Atrocities deserve more attention than secular philosophers have so far paid them. They are distinguished from ordinary wrongs not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done. Evildoers need not be sadistic:they may simply be negligent or unscrupulous in pursuing their goals. Card's theory represents a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic alternatives (including Kant's theory of radical evil). Utilitarians tend to reduce evils to their harms; Stoics tend to reduce evils to the wickedness of perpetrators: Card accepts neither reduction. She also responds to Nietzsche's challenges about the worth of the concept of evil, and she uses her theory to argue that evils are more important than merely unjust inequalities. She applies the theory in explorations of war rape and violence against intimates. She also takes up what Primo Levi called "the gray zone", where victims become complicit in perpetrating on others evils that threaten to engulf themselves. While most past accounts of evil have focused on perpetrators, Card begins instead from the position of the victims, but then considers more generally how to respond to -- and live with -- evils, as victims, as perpetrators, and as those who have become both. (shrink)

We introduce what we call the Emergent Model of forgiving, which is a process-based relational model conceptualizing forgiving as moral and normative repair in the wake of grave wrongs. In cases of grave wrongs, which shatter the victim’s life, the Classical Model of transactional forgiveness falls short of illuminating how genuine forgiveness can be achieved. In a climate of persistent threat and distrust, expressions of remorse, rituals and gestures of apology, and acts of reparation are unable to secure the moral (...) confidence and trust required for moral repair, much less for forgiveness. Without the rudiments of a shared moral world — a world in which, at the very least, the survivor’s violation can be collectively recognized as a violation, and her moral status and authority collectively acknowledged and respected — expressions of remorse, gestures and rituals of apology, or promises of compensation have no authority as meaningful communicative acts with reparative significance. Accordingly, we argue that repair in the wake of traumatic violence involves ‘world-building,’ which supports the ability of survivors to move from despair to hope, from radical and disabling distrust to trust and engagement, and thus from impotence to effective agency. Our Emergent Model treats forgiveness as a slowly developing outcome of a series of changes in a person’s relationship to the trauma and its aftermath, in which moral agency is regained. We argue that forgiveness after grave wrongs and world-shattering harm, when it occurs, emerges from other phenomena, such as cohabitation within a community, gestures of reconciliation, working on shared projects, the developing of trust. On this view, forgiveness is an emergent phenomenon; it entails taking and exercising normative power—coming to claim one’s own moral authority in relation to oneself, one’s assailant, and one’s community. The processes that ultimately constitute forgiving are part and parcel of normative repair more broadly construed. (shrink)

Bashabi Fraser is a poet in her own right. She is also a creative translator. This is a review of her edited volume on the Partition of Bengal. The review highlights our need to read the partition event as a warning for future and ongoing genocides. The review also shows the superiority of literature over history. And finally it has something to say about translation and separately, on P Lal. For instance, this reviewer in many other reviews too insists on (...) the superiority of Fr Mignon SJ over Prof Lal's understanding of translation. (shrink)

This is a Hindu take on violence perpetrated on Christians.

In Complicity and the Rwandan Genocide ( 2010b ), Larry May argues that complicity can be the basis for criminal liability if two conditions are met: First, the person’s actions or inactions must contribute to the harm in question, and secondly, the person must know that his actions or inactions risk contributing to this harm. May also states that the threshold for guilt for criminal liability is higher than for moral responsibility. I agree with this latter claim, but I think (...) that it casts doubt on May’s account of criminal liability, particular in so-called performance cases in which low-level participants merely fail to help. This is because it is far from clear that passive non-helpers are morally responsible for their participation in widespread harms. Situationism purports to show that passive bystanders typically are not morally responsible for their role in such harms, because they were behaving reasonably subject to the constraints they faced. In this paper, I assess this claim, and defend it on the basis of O. W. Holmes’ standard of the reasonable person as a guide to judging criminal complicity. Finally, I provide a situationist account of the Rwandan genocide, which focuses on the systemic causes and primary perpetrators of the genocide, rather than low-level participants. (shrink)

This essay explores several moral issues raised by global warming through the lens of Claudia Card's theory of evil. I focus on Alaskan villages in the sub-Arctic whose residents must relocate owing to extreme erosion, melting sea ice, and rising water levels. I use Card's discussion of genocide as social death to argue that failure to help these groups maintain their unique cultural identities can be thought of as genocidal.

In everything from philosophical ethics to legal argument to public activism, it has become commonplace to appeal to the idea of human dignity. In such contexts, the concept of dignity typically signifies something like the fundamental moral status belonging to all humans. Remarkably, however, it is only in the last century that this meaning of the term has become standardized. Before this, dignity was instead a concept associated with social status. Unfortunately, this transformation remains something of a mystery in existing (...) scholarship. Exactly when and why did "dignity" change its meaning? And before this change, was it truly the case that we lacked a conception of human worth akin to the one that "dignity" now represents? In this volume, leading scholars across a range of disciplines attempt to answer such questions by clarifying the presently murky history of "dignity," from classical Greek thought through the Middle Ages and Enlightenment to the present day. (shrink)

This article revisits one of the threats that Raphael Lemkin envisioned when he coined the term "genocide" - infectious diseases. Specifically, the article examines whether the spread of infectious diseases can constitute the requisite actus reus and mens rea of genocide under Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, as adopted from the Genocide Convention. The article examines and distinguishes relevant case law of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, decisions of the Inter-American Commission (...) on Human Rights, and decisions of domestic courts. The article concludes that the deliberate spread of infectious diseases can fall within the prohibited acts of genocide but that proving the special intent will be difficult due to evidentiary requirements and the ability of defendants to assert plausible intervening causes. (shrink)

The problem of forgiveness may rightly be regarded as a perennial philosophical problem. But of what sort? Introducing his 1973 contribution to the discussion, entitled simply "Forgiveness"—an essay that remains the standard reference for contemporary discussions of the problem, especially in the Anglo-American philosophical community—Aurel Kolnai writes that while the ethical nature of the problem is indisputable, he intends his argument "to be chiefly logical in nature: the central question I wish to discuss is … whether, and if so in (...) what manner, [forgiveness] is logically possible at all."1 The problem, as Kolnai develops it in the first two sections of his essay, is that forgiveness seems to be either... (shrink)