The Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1923 carried out by the Turkish government is also widely known and recognized as genocide.
But the word “genocide,” like “Holocaust,” is also used for a variety of other historical incidents and horrors that can mean not only a widening of its application but a diluting of its meaning and a reduction of its potency as a word implying the strongest condemnation.
It has become common for people on the left side of the political spectrum to refer to the centuries-long process of conquest and displacement by Europeans of the aboriginal peoples of North and South America as genocide. At the Netroots Nation 2019 convention I attended last week in Philadelphia, several speakers I heard made reference to the "genocide" of native North Americans. And also to the fact that we were meeting on stolen land that once belonged to local Indians.
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| 19th Century Engraving of the Pequot War of 1636-38 (Library of Congress) |
This also sometimes leads to a verbal competition as to whose Holocaust is worse. This is rare. But it does happen. We see in the current discussions of reparations for slavery that those discussing it in a serious way take care in discussing the precedents for reparations, which include reparations for the Nazi Holocaust, to frame their arguments in a way that makes them hard for critics to twist into an accusation that they are making a pitch of, well, the Jews get reparations, why can't we?
I'm including at the end a series of links to posts I made back when I was a baby blogger, at least compared to now. They deal with Ward Churchill, a controversal scholar of Native American affairs who became a favorite bogeyman of Republicans back in 2005. A post several years later also talked about his scholarly reputation, Remember Ward Churchill? 04/10/2009. Rightwingers attacked Churchill as a left critic of American society. But as I showed in the 2005 posts linked below that in significant ways, Churchill's arguments suggested that his approach was more of a rightwing ethnic-nationalist perspective and had some disturbing similarities to Holocaust-denial arguments. Which may sound surprising for someone whose scholarly work emphasizes the argument that the treatment of North Americans amounted to genocide.
And his work has been influential for those making that case. Jeffrey Ostler is doing very serious and interesting work on the question of genocide in the case of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere. In his book Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (2019), he writes:
Although Raphaël Lemkin coined the term genocide in 1944, it was not until almost fi fty years later that the question of genocide in the Americas became a matter of scholarly and public debate. The debate began at the time of the Columbus Quincentennial in 1992, when activists and writers challenged a celebratory narrative of the “discovery of the New World” by arguing that the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere was consistently genocidal. Two works were particularly influential: David Stannard’s American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (1992) and Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (1997). As their titles announced, Stannard and Churchill made their case by arguing for an equivalence with the Holocaust. Their narrative strategy was to relate horrific event after horrific event (massacres, enslavements, epidemics), indict Europeans and European Americans for their greed, racism, and bloodlust, and link these to statistics underscoring the drastic decline of Indigenous populations in the Americas. In this way, they created the impression of an unrelenting, intentioned, and unambiguously evil process that resembled as closely as possible the Nazis’ systematic annihilation of the Jews. Theirs was a story of genocide, genocide, and genocide, and there was little room for anything else. [my emphasis]In an article for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Genocide and American Indian History 2015), Ostler notes, "To a significant extent, disagreements about the pervasiveness of genocide in the history of the post-Columbian Western Hemisphere, in general, and U.S. history, in particular, pivot on definitions of genocide."
Along with the inherent grimness of the subject, the need to parse definitions of genocide and their applicability can easily sound bureaucratically cold-blooded. Nevertheless, it's important to remember that genocide is a specific crime defined in international law. It does not include every vicious, murderous, and illegitimate act of mass violence.
Ostler's encyclopedia article gives a good overview of the relevant issues in making a serious evaluation of how native history in the US fits into the genocide framework. In his book, he argues that the case for genocide is strongest in the case of individual cases, like the extermination of the Pequots, the Indian tribe for which Captain Ahab's doomed ship in Moby Dick is named. The rabid and bloody displacement of native California tribes initiated by the Gold Rush is another, for which he considers the genocide case "particularly strong."
But he also is unwilling to dismiss the consideration that American Indian policy on a larger scale should be considered genocide:
Genocide was not present all the time, and so to answer the question of genocide for this part of American history with an absolute “yes” would be simplistic. But replying with an absolute “no” would overlook a great deal. Not only would it fail to take seriously Indians’ own views on the matter, it would miss many other overlooked dimensions of this history. It would fail to fully reckon with the fact that government officials consistently used genocidal threats to secure consent, and it would continue to ignore the fact that the United States adopted a policy of exterminating Indians who resisted its demands. Dismissing genocide might also prevent us from fathoming the depths of Indian removal. At one time, I thought ethnic cleansing was probably the best term for the U.S. policy of Indian removal, but as I began to grasp the full impact of removal as it was pursued for more than twenty years (from the 1830s into the 1850s), as I came to a better understanding of the demographic catastrophes it inflicted on so many nations, and as I realized that these catastrophes were the direct result of a policy that was continued by government officials who knew what was happening, I could not escape the conviction that what I was witnessing had to be considered genocide. [my emphasis]The official definition of genocide is found in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). There is international case law that have clearly identified instances of genocide under this definition, largely from the Nuremburg Tribunal convictions and cases dealing with Rwanda and the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. One of the factors that looms large in Ostler's analysis is the fact that the Genocide Convention excludes "cultural genocide." It also excludes action targeting political groups: "genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Intent is a critical factor in the crime of genocide as defined there, as the last quote from Ostler recognizes. As he indicates in his encyclopedia article, "debates about whether or not specific cases and phases qualify as genocide typically center on these issues: the intentions of historical actors (including but not limited to governments), the extent of depopulation of particular groups, and the causes of their depopulation."
My own approach at this time is to rely on the Genocide Convention definition. Also in the encyclopedia article, Ostler seems to identify that definition as the conservative outlook, while the scholarly range used for understanding genocide is broader:
Conservative definitions emphasize intentional actions and policies of governments that result in very large population losses, usually from direct killing. More liberal definitions call for less stringent criteria for intent, focusing more on outcomes. They do not necessarily require direct sanction by state authorities; rather, they identify societal forces and actors.My purpose in this post is to pose the problem and explain in a general way the need to be careful in using the genocide label. When I first began engaging with politics, Spiro Agnew was Vice President under Richard Nixon. His answer to antiwar arguments that the Vietnam War was immoral was to say, "All wars are immoral." That wasn't a pacifist sentiment. It was a cynical sneer. Because if all wars are immoral, none are immoral. Or at least, it means that moral criteria should not be applied to questions of war and peace, thus casually tossing out not only international law but also nearly two millennia of Western religious traditions on the just war.
We need to be mindful of the risk that expanding the definition of genocide too far could reduce its public meaning in a way that could obscure the nature of genocide as defined in the Genocide Convention. If we turn "genocide" rhetorically to include everything from a failure to provide bilingual education (cultural genocide) to intentional mass killing targeted on a particular "national, ethnical, racial or religious group," it can have that effect. In other words, if everything is genocide, nothing is genocide. That is, genocide as a concept loses its current meaning.
Posts on Ward Churchill:
- Chuckie Watch 85: Ole Chuckie shore is smarter than them professers 02/01/2005
- What have the Republicans done for us lately? 02/10/2005
- The Red Lake shooting and rightwing extremism 03/24/2005
- And this is *respectable* Republican commentary... 03/28/2005
- More on Ward Churchill, who's already gotten way more attention than he deserved 04/11/2005
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