Abstract
Setting aside the destruction of the biosphere, nothing in the ugly spectrum of human wrong- and evil-doing is worse than genocide. It is the most Satanic of evil acts, an “odious scourge” upon humanity, as the U.N. Convention on Genocide puts it. It appears early in the historical record, when the despots of antiquity built monuments and sang songs celebrating the slaughter of foreign populations. But it is in the modern period that genocide appears with a frequency, intensity, and magnitude far surpassing early tyrants and marauders. Throughout the twentieth century and continuing to the present day, genocide has been uninterrupted. Armenians, Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists, Kulaks, Tutsis, Capitalists, Kurds, Sudanese, Syrians, and today the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar form but a partial list of twentieth-century victims of genocide.
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Notes
- 1.
Beryl Lang, “The Evil in Genocide,” in Genocide and Human Rights: A Philosophical Guide, edited by John K. Roth editor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 5.
- 2.
Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), 399.
- 3.
Raphael Lemkin, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. Donna-Lee Frieze editor (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), 2.
- 4.
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid., 177.
- 8.
Axis Rule…, 79.
- 9.
Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide,” The American Scholar, 15 (April, 1946): 227–230.
- 10.
Ibid., 228.
- 11.
Autobiography…, 172.
- 12.
Ibid., 173.
- 13.
Quoted by Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York, London, Toronto, Syndney: HarperCollins, 2002), 66. Quoted from Lemkin’s, “The Truth About the Genocide Convention,” p. 2, reel 3, Lemkin Papers, New York Public Library.
- 14.
Autobiography…, 167.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid., 165.
- 17.
Axis Rule…, 91. Also, …Autobiography…, 103.
- 18.
“Greatest civilizing ideals,” cited by Power, 71. On Lemkin and the Nobel prize, see Power, 77. “Brilliant,” Tanya Elder’s assessment, “What You see before Your Eyes: Documenting Raphael Lemkin’s Life by Exploring His Archival Papers, 1900–1959,” in The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence, edited by Dominik J. Schaller and Jurgen Zimmerer (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 37. “Always meeting him,” cited by Power from A. M. Rosenthal, “A Man Called Lemkin,” New York Times, October 18, 1988, p. A31. Rosenthal was a reporter who sat nearest the door of the New York Times office.
- 19.
- 20.
A Kantian position would be that civilians contributing to the military as military (and not the military as human beings) are legitimate targets. But even here there are difficulties. What about people who are forced against their will to work in e.g., munitions factories? Perhaps those creating forced labor in such installations are culpable for their deaths, and not the pilots who blow up such factories. In the first Gulf War, tens of thousands of Iraqi young men were forced at gunpoint, including threats to their families, to fight the coalition forces. The Saddam Hussein regime bore responsibility for their deaths. The same would be true of soldiers or armed militia using as a base of operations a school, hospital, or apartment building. They have a moral duty to evacuate those buildings.
- 21.
Cited in James L. Martin, The Man Who Invented Genocide: The Public Career and Consequences of Raphael Lemkin (Torrance, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1984), Appendix II, 316.
- 22.
Claudia Card, Confronting Evils…, 237–293.
- 23.
Ibid., 237. My italics. On page 282 she attributes her social death theory to Lemkin.
- 24.
Ibid., 279.
- 25.
Ibid., 255.
- 26.
Ibid., 262.
- 27.
Ibid., 265.
- 28.
Ibid., 249.
- 29.
Ibid., 248.
- 30.
Dale Jamieson, “The City Around Us,” in Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in Environmental Ethics, edited by Tom Regan (New York: Random House, 1984).
- 31.
Jean-Paul Sartre, On Genocide (New York: Beacon Press, 1968), 78–79.
- 32.
Nicolas Werth, “The Crimes of the Stalin Regime: Outline for an Inventory and Classification,” in The Historiography of Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 414–415.
- 33.
Ibid., 413. Werth notes that in 2003 the Republic of Ukraine officially recognized the 1932–1933 famine as genocidal. In Ukraine holodomar means to kill by starvation.
- 34.
Jason J. Campbell, On the Nature of Genocidal Intent (Lanham, Boulder, New York, Toronto, and Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2013). Also, see Israel Charny, “On the Development of the Genocide Early Warning System (GEWS),” in The Encyclopedia of Genocide, vol. I, edited by Israel Charny (Santa Barbara, Denver, and Oxford, England: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 254–271.
- 35.
Bruce Wilshire, Get ‘Em All! Kill ‘Em! Genocide, Terrorism, Righteous Communities (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005), 23–24.
- 36.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, George J. Becker translator (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 39 Sartre says that the Nazis regarded the Jew as free to do evil but not good. Thus the Jew chooses evil and can be hated.
- 37.
See Jonathan Glover, Humanity. See Chapter 30, “Mao’s Utopian Project,” 283–298.
- 38.
Philip Gourevich, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
- 39.
Sherrie L. Russell-Brown, “Rape as an Act of Genocide,” Berkeley Journal of International Law, 21 (2003), 355. Rape as genocidal is not restricted to the events in Bosnia, as Russell-Brown points out.
- 40.
Card, 290: Sperm “…as an instrument of genocide…arguably does become a WMD.” But this inflates the concept of a WMD to such an extent that the entire array of genocidal instruments become weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the proper abbreviation for the proper concept should be “WIMD,” weapons of indeterminate mass destruction. Chemicals, bacteria, radiation cannot be controlled, that is, their effects may far outreach their intended target due to certain contingencies such as the direction the wind is blowing.
- 41.
William James writes of an “empirical self,” which is all that one cares about. He divides it into material, social, and spiritual components. The Principles of Psychology, vol. I, 292–305.
- 42.
Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 46–47.
- 43.
Dale Jamieson, “The City Around Us,” in Earthbound: New Introductory Essays in Environmental Ethics, edited by Tom Regan (New York: Random House, 1984), 64. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced five native American nations to relocate. The Cherokee lost 55% of its population, the Creeks 35%. Alienation, disorientation, depression, lack of correspondence between their daily routines and the new location were the result.
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DeArmey, M.H. (2020). The Evil of Genocide. In: Cosmopolitanism and the Evils of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42978-2_8
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