However the ICJ rules, this will have serious implications for how the world understands Israel’s use of the Holocaust as a justification for its existence and actions and as a founding myth for the nation of Israel itself.
How legitimate is it to describe Israel's system as an "apartheid" one? What does "settler colonialism" mean and does it apply to Israel? Are Israel or Hamas or both engaged in a "genocide"?
He does an impressive job here of identifying some of the issues without dumbing it down. It's a lot more complicated than a lot of people may assume - and of course it's always a downer subject. Ostler has a recent book called Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas that, despite the title, really digs into the weeds of how challenging it can be to apply the current international law concept of genocide to the 19th century or earlier. In this case, applying it to the case of settler colonialism, which pretty much characterized the entire European colonial project in all of North and South America over centuries.
Identifying genocide in history
Genocide studies can be a minefield. As one example from serious work on the topic of the Holocaust would be the very different views of the "Jewish Councils" (Jüdenräte) taken by Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, and Lucy Dawidowicz.
And ideological hacks of various kinds are happy to muddy the waters where they can. Of course.
When it comes to the question of settler colonialism and genocide, the actual field, as Ostler's book shows in detail, has some genuinely tangled question. In the case of European colonialism in the Americas, one huge question is the actual number of native inhabitants in the late 15th century, when Columbus famously "discovered" America. There is no real question that European diseases spread to the Americas with deadly consequences. But exactly how deadly they were depends on how many people were there in "precolumbian" times. If the higher estimates are accurate, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that European germs and viruses (although no one knew what either was at the time!) had by far the most devastating effect on native societies, both in terms of the number killed and in terms of the crippling devastation to social organization that such a massive, rapid number of deaths would imply.
And that's an empirical, factual question, not just a matter of historical interpretation.
Genocide as now defined in international law is not a war crime but a distinct crime, and even deliberate mass cruelty with deadly consequenes does not meet the genocide definition. The UN's 1948 Genocide Convention does not include the targeting of a political minority or even a social class of people for death. The notorious mass killing of Communists (real and alleged) by the Suharto regime in Indonesia after his 1965 coup, to take only one example among far too many, does not fall under the definition of genocide.
The international law specialist Raphaël Lemkin, who is credited with coining the word "genocide", included the concept of "cultural genocide", which is a familiar concept for the contemporary left, in his definition. But the UN Genocide Convention does not.
And like other crimes, genocide is also defined by intent. In American criminal law, killing someone by reckless driving is defined as a different crime than deliberately targeting someone and running them down with a car, although the victim is just as dead in both cases. Ostler mention the role of intent and how to establish it with genocide in the Post column.
So, in the case of settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere, the role of disease matters but also whether the colonists had the intent to spread diseases with the goal of killing off native populations.
So, for serious history, there are important and difficult issues in applying the concept of genocide to settler colonial situations, which includes the treatment of native peoples in the Americas by European colonialists and their predominately white descendants. And not only in the Americas. Historians, for instance, also discuss whether cases like the war against the Hereros by Imperial Germany in their German South West Africa colony, now Namibia. (See: Germany regrets Namibia 'genocide'BBC News 01/12/2004.
American Indians in far-right American propaganda
Lots of white Americans tend to code anything they perceived ethnic-pride movements as "left."
And in the world of small political sectarian groups, there are a lot of weird variations. And there is a strain of far-right ideology that celebrates a romanticized image of the native inhabitants of North America as primordial Americans, extending to the weird schtick of a kind of American Indian Nazism. If that sounds bizarrely eccentric, that's because it is. Like so much on the far right.
Why do I bring that up in this context? Because part of the Holocaust-denier strategy is to minimize, "relativize", and distract from the Holocaust carried out by the German Nazis. And similar arguments can be tempting for ethnic-nationalist movements.
Dave Neiwert wrote 15 years ago about the weird nexus of some American Indians with the far right in The SuccubusOrcinus 03/23/2005.
Around that same time, Republican were foaming at the mouth over Ward Churchill, a Native American scholar who had said something they took to be sacrilegious about the 9/11 attacks. When I dug into Churchill's background a bit, it became obvious that he had a quirky, ethnic-nationalist argument and argued at least in part in the language of Holocaust deniers:
Nazi cultural pluralism took an added twist when Hitler's government declared that American Indians were members of the Aryan race. The Bund made serious (but virtually fruitless) efforts to recruit Indians as members. In 1937, [far-right leader William Dudley] Pelley, calling himself "Chief Pelley of the Tribe of Silver," promised American Indians that he would free them from reservations and place Jews in reservations instead. The emblem of the tiny American National-Socialist Party was "an American Indian, arm outstretched in salute, poised against a black swastika." These moves combined White Americans' traditional parasitic use of the American Indian as political symbol. as in the Boston Tea Party, with German Nazism's romanticist cult of nature and of "savagery" as the antithesis of corrupt Jewish civilization. (Hitler was an avid fan of Karl May's novels, in which noble Indians figured prominently.) U.S. fascist groups also made common cause with the right-wing American Indian Federation (AIF) against the Roosevelt administration's 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, which replaced naked colonialism with more sophisticated federal control through elected tribal governments. The AIF, which advocated full assimilation of Americans Indians into White society, opposed the 1934 act as communistic. [my emphasis]
The most unexpected aspect of the book is Bernstein’s revelation that there was a connection between the American Indian Federation and the German-American Bund. This is particularly surprising, considering that Native Americans would never fit the Aryan ideal. But Bernstein explores the ways that AIF embraced and perpetuated anti-Semitism within the organization. Bernstein provides the example of the American Nation Conference in Asheville, where AIF activist Alice Lee Jemision and anti-Semitic leader of the Silver Legion, William Dudley Pelley, shared a stage and “Native Americans sporting swastika armbands worked the audience, handing out pro-Nazi pamphlets” (97). As Bernstein observes, “Native Americans, while not viewed as racially pure, were a unique market for Bundist manipulation” (98). What does this peculiar relationship tell us about race, ethnicity, and the position of Native Americans in the United States in the '30s?
The image of the “noble savage” embodied by Sioux warriors was embedded in Nazi cultural studies — they admired their “warrior” culture, and Hitler’s fascination with the Western novels of Karl May was well known. The Nazis even declared the Sioux to be Aryan — thus American Indians were acceptable in the Nazi’s tent. The Bund touted its connections with Native Americans, noting the swastika was an ancient native symbol, and running editorials in their publications claiming a role as “wards” of the American Indians to protect them from “anti-Christian Communism.”
Before and during World War II, Nazi propaganda declared American cultural imperialism a threat to German culture, noting that it had destroyed the Native American way of life and comparing U.S. bombing campaigns in German cities to American frontier massacres. Usbeck calls this “co-victimization” — an invented affinity with the Native American experience of genocide and cultural loss, rhetorically linked to ideas of German victimhood. The Nazis thereby used Indigenous people to create a myth of survival, of a people fighting heroically for their homeland.
Bottom line: don't fall into the trap of thinking it's easy to apply the concept of genocide to countries like the United States with a settler-colonial past. And there are lots of ideological booby traps on the way to thinking it through.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar attracted criticism even from some of her admirers (of which I'm one) on the left with her decision to vote "Present" on a House resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide of 1915-1923.
Omar said that while she believes that accountability for human rights abuses is "paramount," she also believes that "accountability and recognition of genocide should not be used as a cudgel in a political fight. It should be done based on academic consensus outside the push and pull of geopolitics."
If Congress truly wishes to acknowledge historic crimes against humanity, Omar added, it should look closer to home.
She argued that such a step "must include both the heinous genocides of the 20th century, along with earlier mass slaughters like the transatlantic slave trade and the Native American genocide, which took the lives of hundreds of millions of people in this country." For this reason, Omar said she voted "present" on the bill. [my emphasis]
This tweet by Michael Brooks retweeting a criticism by TYT reporter Ken Klippenstein is an example of criticism of her from the left:
Trash vote and trash statement. She’s really good and there are geopolitical reasons behind the vote. She should hear from everyone how absolutely awful this is https://t.co/aUo5eXQOdT
That doesn‘t mean we can‘t argue for a broader definition. The attorney Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) who is credited with inventing the term genocide (in the 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe) did employ a wider definition himself. This short video from the US Holocaust Museum remembers Lemkin, Eyewitness Testimony: Raphael Lemkin:
But the wider the definition, the more examples people have to accuse countries of hypocrisy when they single out a genocide for condemnation. Jeffrey Ostler, an actual scholar of genocide, discusses at some length the challenges in applying the concept to one of the examples Congresswoman Omar used in his book, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (2019).
Comparing genocides to one another unfortunately can lead to some frivolous political rhetoric along the lines of my-genocide-is-worse-than-your-genocide. It can be a real rhetorical minefield.
I spent some time in the 1990s trying to learn about the Nazi Holocaust and to understand how it is treated in various historical narratives. That included learning about some of the polemical arguments made by people who want to minimize the seriousness of the Holocaust in some way.
One example of that produced a public discussion in Germany in the 1980s that became known as the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute). This was an argument among scholars that was conducted in the popular press. (Matthias von Hellfeld, Vor 25 Jahren: Der HistorikerstreitDeutsche Welle 20.07.2011) It was kicked it off by a 1986 editorial column by Ernst Nolte, a German historian who (at least until then!) was a respected one. Nolte's earlier work on fascism, particularly his 1963 book published in English in 1965 as The Three Faces of Fascism; Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, is still regarded as an important work.
But in 1986, Nolte made the bizarre argument that I will summarize this way: because the Soviet Union had set up concentration camps, this inspired Hitler's idea of exterminating the Jews. So Stalin was responsible for the Holocaust. Other historians and the well-known Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas criticized Nolte's piece, though there were prominent historians who were at least partly supportive of Nolte.
Nolte and his partisans didn't put it that crassly. But his argument served to shift part of the blame and responsibility for the Holocaust away from Hitler and Germany. "Did the [Soviet] 'Gulag Archipelago' not exist prior to Auschwitz?" asked Nolte, who referred to the Holocaust as an "Asiatic" act, i.e., not genuinely German or European. In other words, he used the comparison as a deflection from the historical seriousness of the Holocaust. He also wrote, "Auschwitz does not result primarily from traditional anti-Semitism and was not at its core a mere 'genocide', but rather the reaction to the extermination processes of the Russian Revolution born of fear," i.e. German fear of the Russians. In other words, the Holocaust wasn't really a "genocide", and the Commies were to blame anyway.
The Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945 also plays a role in Holocaust denier polemics. The argument is, look at how savagely the Allies bombed and killed Germans in Dresden and that shows what murderous intentions they had against all Germans, so the Holocaust was a response to those evil intentions. The decision against the far-right historian David Irving in Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstat (2000) has an excellent discussion of Irving's own revisionist and inaccurate historical accounts of the bombing of Dresden. And it describes how this can be used in a narrative that tries to minimize the Holocaust:
Irving has also made broader claims which tend to minimise the Holocaust. For example he has claimed that the Jews in the East were shot by individual gangsters and criminals and that there was no direction or policy in place for mass extermination to be carried out. I do, however, accept that Irving expressed himself in more measured language on this topic than in the case of the gas chambers. But he has also minimised the number of those killed by means other than gas at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Having grossly underestimated the number who lost their lives in the camps, Irving is prone to claim that a greater number than that were killed in Allied bombing raids on Dresden and elsewhere. He has, moreover, repeatedly claimed that the British Psychological War Executive ingeniously invented the lie that the Nazis were killing Jews in gas chambers in order to use it as propaganda. (p. 176) [my emphasis]
So comparing genocides can be tricky.
And this is a big reason why I currently tend toward a more conservative definition of what constitutes genocide and try to orient my view around the international law version enshrined in the Genocide Convention.
Particularly as historical awareness of the Holocaust in the US and Europe has grown over recent decades, the term "genocide" has understandably taken on an implication of the worst of all possible crimes. So there is a temptation to apply it as a superlative to more and more situations. So people talk about a genocidal war in Vietnam, a genocidal war in Yemen, the slave trade as genocide, settler colonialism in the Western Hemisphere as genocide. But the Genocide Convention established genocide as a distinct type of crime, not as something that applies to all wars or all famines or all discrimination.
And there are reasons for that. Criminal law discriminates between different degrees of illegal killing. In the US, manslaughter is distinguished from second degree murder and both are distinguished from first degree murder. There is also a category of murder "with special circumstances," i.e., killing involving unusual cruelty. These don't mean that society considers any of these kinds of killings okay. It does mean that it does make distinctions based among other things on motive and intentions.
In terms of popular polemics involving genocide, it's important to keep in mind that the more broadly a particular term is applied, the greater the risk that its meaning will become blurred, or that it will lose some of its intellectually and emotionally evocative power. To put it in a more exaggerated way, if every kind of collective violence is genocide, genocide becomes just another word for collective violence.
I've always remembered the line used by Richard Nixon's Vice President Spiro Agnew in dismissing contemporary criticisms from antiwar activists that the Vietnam War was immoral. He brushed it off by saying, "All wars are immoral." Which meant in practice, no wars are immoral. On its face, it was a radical pacifist position, though no sentient being took Agnew or Nixon to be radical pacifists. Actually, Agnew's position was also directly sneering at over a millennium of Christian religious traditions on the Just War, as well as similar traditions in other religions. And, however imperfectly the religious doctrines or international law have functioned in limiting violence, it is illegal in international law to invade another country that is not threatening the invader. The defendants in the Nuremberg Trials were accused and convicted of waging "aggressive war," the legal term used there for an illegal invasion. A secular version of the Just War doctrine, in other words.
Telford Taylor, the chief American chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, wrote in Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970):
The lack of a satisfactory definition of "aggressive war" ... should not be taken as a sufficient argument against its use as a description of unlawful international conduct. In fact, as the discussion and application of the standard since it came into common parlance reveals, it is not significantly different from the tests for the lawful use of defensive force in our domestic criminal law. As we have already seen, the parallelism is of long standing. There is remarkable similarity between the criteria stated by Suarez and Grotius for distinguishing the just from the unjust war, and the provision of the New York Penal Law specifying. the circumstances under which force may rightfully be used: to defend one's sell, one's property or to assist other persons engaged in defending themselves or their property. [my emphasis]
Agnew, in other words, watered down the concept of a war being immoral to the point of rendering it meaningless. Political speech can have that effect on the meaning of words and phrases. Actual experts on the subject, like Taylor in that case, have a more substantive take.
And here's where Ilhan Omar's position calls attention to some important considerations, though I do wish she had voted for the resolution. If we actually consider the fate of native populations in the Western Hemisphere after European colonization as genocide, people have a substantive point in arguing that the US - and every Latin American country, for that matter - are acting hypocritically in criticizing other countries for genocide if they haven't condemned their own genocides against native peoples.
I'm going to put on my Reluctant Realist hat for a couple of minutes here and say that foreign policy, unfortunately, runs to a large degree on hypocrisy. If the US waits to condemn wrongs and injustices abroad until it has formally condemned and made just restitution for every domestic wrong, it will never condemn any foreign wrong whatsoever. And that would not be a good outcome, either.
Yes, of course, these condemnations have political considerations involved with them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ever do them. It does mean, though, that it's legitimate for Members of Congress to criticize the political considerations being applied in individual cases.
I just happen to disagree with Ilhan Omar's vote on this one.
Genocide is a dramatic word. In ordinary usage, it invokes the deliberate destruction of an entire group of people, or attempting to do so. The most familiar case that virtually everyone understands as genocide is the attempt by Hitler and the Nazis to murder the Jews of Europe. Or, more generally the Holocaust, which took the lives of six million Jews and a similar number of other groups the Nazis regarded as inferior or dangerous.
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.
19th Century Engraving of the Pequot War of 1636-38 (Library of Congress)
I'm working on some further posts on the history of the North American settlement and the Indian Wars which stretched over centuries. But here I just want to say more briefly that I generally lean toward a careful use of the concept of genocide. People on the left also often refer to wars as genocidal, including the current Saudi war in Yemen. The African slave trade and slavery in the Western Hemisphere are also sometimes called a case of genocide, or an African Holocaust.
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.
