Comments on: Excusing or justifying genocide

By: The Shamrockshire Eagle, editor and sole proprietor of

The Shamrockshire Eagle, editor and sole proprietor of — Tue, 27 Jan 2004 05:57:43 +0000

“Europe in 1492 was beginning to develop the nation state. It’s simply not the case that it was considered A-OK to wipe out whole white populations or forcibly relocate them.” Jesus, Daniel, I thought you knew more about Irish hisory than that! But hey, it’s OK. I got used to the idea that we’re only physically “white” a long time ago.

By: msg

msg — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 07:34:23 +0000

Keith- I’m sorry, but I believe it’s obscene to continue to talk about grief being measured in this way. I really can’t make the distinction. I go numb with it, it becomes abstract and two-dimensional. The idea of someone arguing the validity of their grief, or their people’s grief, on the basis of the numbers of the dead is disgusting.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Thu, 15 Jan 2004 00:48:38 +0000

That’s not an accurate description of most Native American relationships to their land (or of that of the Australian Aborigines, whose treatment by the British was similar in tactics and philosophical justifications). Even nomadic Native Americans did have important connections to particular pieces of land. It was just a different type of connection — based more on religious/cultural significance and ethnoscientific knowledge of the utility of different places than on private property regimes and investment in landesque capital. I accept the correction; obviously Rousseau and most philosophers of his time had only very ‘ideal-tpye” views of what they saw as primitive peoples and some of the rather odd views he had on language or Kant on different capabilities across ethnic groups can only be seen in this light – apart from anything else this kind of idealisation rests on a conception of ‘noble savages’ existing primarily as relatively isolated individuals as opposed to in collective groups with some social life. However, it does indicate that there was an awareness of the fact that different peoples, particularly non-settled, non-European ones did not have the same relationship to land that existed for European and several other ‘Old World’ civilisations at the time. Hence the introduction of private property rights and the changes in ecology brought about by establishing settled agrarian communities on this scale in the New World was going to be profoundly disruptive and replace one way of life, indeed one people quite literally in most cases, with another. On a more general note, I found this essay on the “Colonial Darkside of Democracy” by Michael Mann to be an excellent summary and analysis of several case studies of ethnic cleansing and genocide from the US, Mexico, SW Africa and Austrialia. Bit of a long read but worth it in my opinion. http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/press/103mann.pdf

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 23:49:52 +0000

"Maybe most people can easily distinguish between the grief of a thousand mothers and the grief of a million. I can’t."—msg

Forgive me, but this seems like posturing to me. I can tell the difference because the grief of a thousand mothers is a scream in the night, while the grief of a million mothers rings the world like a bell. Perhaps you've not been listening. But to confuse the two demeans both.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 23:35:43 +0000

Jeremy: you misunderstand me. I was distinguishing the Holocaust, from common genocide, from ethnic cleansing. I think the Holocaust stands alone and that equivocations such as “American Holocaust” are deeply false. You’ll notice that I’ve characterized the US’s treatment of aboriginal populations in several cases as “genocidal”; what I’ve disputed was that it can fairly and accurately be characterized as a policy of genocide as a whole—I don’t think it can.

By: ahem

ahem — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 22:46:37 +0000

You might take a look at what was going on in Spain in 1492, Daniel, unless your qualifying word “white” excludes Muslims and Jews There’s the small matter of what happened to the Huguenots, as well.

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 19:29:30 +0000

Dsquared: “There are also more Jews alive today than there were in 1933. What happened to the American Indians was genocide if anything was.” Huh? By most accounts the world Jewish population in 1939 was approximately 16.5 million. Sixty-four years later it is under 13.5 million.

By: rea

rea — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 16:10:49 +0000

“Europe in 1492 was beginning to develop the nation state. It’s simply not the case that it was considered A-OK to wipe out whole white populations or forcibly relocate them.” You might take a look at what was going on in Spain in 1492, Daniel, unless your qualifying word “white” excludes Muslims and Jews

By: Stentor

Stentor — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 14:53:12 +0000

I also thought that one of the reasons why Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, thought the ‘noble savage, was so, well, ‘noble’ was precisely because of the roaming, nomadic life they followed they didn’t have the same investment in a particular attachment to a specific piece of land or claim ownership in the same way but instead tended to avoid excessively intensive conflicts by migrating to another open area, rather than risking a costly escalation of tension That’s not an accurate description of most Native American relationships to their land (or of that of the Australian Aborigines, whose treatment by the British was similar in tactics and philosophical justifications). Even nomadic Native Americans did have important connections to particular pieces of land. It was just a different type of connection—based more on religious/cultural significance and ethnoscientific knowledge of the utility of different places than on private property regimes and investment in landesque capital.

By: Jeremy Osner

Jeremy Osner — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:49:42 +0000

Keith—what qualifies as genocide then? The three events that spring immediately and unequivocally to my mind, are the Holocaust, the Herero genocide, and the Armenian genocide—of these I think only the first really fits your definition of “institutional, technological attempts”—Sudwestafrika and Armenia had no gas chambers. Are you consciously seeking a definition of “genocide” that will apply exclusively to the Holocaust? I would also note that Samuel, Chronicles and Kings are replete with stories of the Hebrew army attacking a city and systematically killing every inhabitant—I think systematic murder of an entire class of people is not so new. But then I would not be able to say for sure that these stories are describe accurately the fighting tactics of the time—there could well be poetic embellishment.

By: msg

msg — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:50:24 +0000

Keith- This subject is so saturated in grief, and irrational hatred, it seems impossible to progress past the shock and horror. Are you throwing the image of eastern Eurpoean Jews up in order to establish the superiority of your sorrow? Are you saying war is never murder? I would contend that too often war, and whatever “conquest” is, is exactly murder, on a scale that too easily becomes abstract. Nothing “equivocates” with the Holocaust. Nothing equivocates with the Clear Lake Massacre, or Wounded Knee. And if saying that is a kind of equalling, so be it. Are you going to suggest the methodology, the technique is really that important? Maybe most people can easily distinguish between the grief of a thousand mothers and the grief of a million. I can’t. What I meant was the personal transcends the theoretical, terminology can’t hold what’s in the heart in these circumstances. The precise technical description of disaster and catastrophe is meaningless in the immediacy of loss. To individuals. And as groups too many of us pretend to an innocence we can’t legitimately claim. Too much current belligerence is defended by just such imagery. My point was more we’re all descended from such acts. This does not in any way excuse or justify them. What it does is defy anyone to remove themselves from the guilt and accusation. There may be innocence, certainly there is, in the immediate and personal sense. Perhaps you feel that for the Jews there is a special exemption owing to their being so clearly the victims. There is a precedent in Jewish history that proves my point, which is, again, not that any one people are guilty, whatever their ethnicity, but that we all are. Exodus Chapter 23 – 27. I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee. 28. And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee. 29. I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against thee. 30. By little and little I will drive them out from before thee, until thou be increased, and inherit the land. 31. And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt drive them out before thee.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:07:09 +0000

"I guess it might be important somewhere to someone to know the precise difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide, but not to the people whose kinfolk are dead from them."—msg

A great many eastern European Jews thought they were on the receiving end of ethnic cleansing, not genocide, as they entered the railroad cars; and I have no doubt that the difference mattered a great deal to both they and their kin. As it likely would to you, given a choice between the two. War, conquest, rape, pillage, and forced population relocation are nothing new in human history. Institutionalized, technological attempts to eradicate an entire race of people from a continent primarily via systematic murder are. All the former atrocities are indefensible. But so is the equivocating of them with the Holocaust.

By: Conrad Barwa

Conrad Barwa — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 00:02:26 +0000

This kind of thinking is quite disturbing, but it is not that new, generally speaking it comes in most cases I can remember from various parts of the hyper-nationalist Right and their adherents who feel the need to posit some kind of TINA argument about how it is either “Us or Them”. One should usually read it as an attempt to prepare the ground for some profoundly illiberal and/or violent policies in the present that would otherwise be popular. As a general note on the question of different treatments of Amerindian populations I would have thought that at least part of the reason was due to religion and method of incorporation within a specific political economy. The Spanish, being Catholics wanted to save souls and so were as interested in converting Indians as exploiting them; also being classic colonists, their interests in the New World lay very much in wealth and resource extraction – as all that gold and silver wasn’t going to mine itself and labour needs were large, it made more sense to coerce local Amerindian populations into sweated mine/plantation labour than kill them off. I assume that being relatively settled agrarian civilisations there was a much greater mass of people to deal with, so physical elimination on such a level wasn’t so easy to practise, not to mention the legal incorporation of Indians as Spanish subjects with some (very limited and periodic) legal rights and protection of the monarchy. Some of this policy spills over into the different attitude, displayed at least partially by the French in Canada and North America; in the former I believe the colonial enterprise was effectively a triumvirate effort between the French state, local trapper/trading interests and the missionaries (mainly Jesuits, I seem to recall) who for a number of reasons enjoyed somewhat better relations with Amerindian populations than Anglo-Saxon settler communities. The latter, being basically settlers and wanting land, needed to remove pesky nomadic/semi-nomadic people from the scene and having won their independence relatively early on; saw the development primarily for their own benefit than for the colonist motherland (in the US at least). No doubt, this is gross simplification but captures, at least some of the factors at work. Without wanting to enter into some mega-debate about genocide and nation-state formation; I remain a bit aghast at some of the things that have been said. I can only echo the recommendation of Samantha Power’s excellent book “A problem from Hell” it is odd how many times the same themes seem to crop up again over and over in this issue. It would be good to bear in mind that according to the 1948 Genocide Convention, a genocide need to not be total or complete (even near complete) to be considered a genocide; one would think that after Armenia and Cambodia this would have sunk in but apparently not. It should also be remembered that states and regimes do have a historical memory and to some extent observe what kind of international sanctions or reactions towards mass killings are like – Hitler’s statement that “who remembers the Armenians” before sanctioning off on his own mittel-europa project of extermination wouldn’t otherwise be possible. The lesson I draw from this is that ‘mini-genocides’ that are tolerated will encourage later genocidal regimes to push the envelope. Even the most exhaustive genocides need to build in some sense on earlier ones to be successful, what the Nazis did in Eastern Europe can trace some of its origins back to their early exterminatory campaigns and use of detainment camps in the Herera genocide in SW Africa right up to Fischer’s bizarre racist theories and medical experiments; ideas which were institutionalised under the Third Reich and whose students went on to fully flesh out the implications of their consequent notions of eugenics, racial classification and ‘hygiene’. A process illustrated very well by Arendt, the Nazi genocides, in Cesaire’s words “turned Europe into a colony”. Rather an unpleasant experience for what hitherto was meant to be the centre of civilisation at the time for its inhabitants. In addition, I don’t see how pre-colonial intra-Amerindian conflicts somehow legitimate later use of mass violence against these peoples; a little bit like saying the rather savage Russo-Polish war of the 1920s and nationalist conflicts on this frontier would somehow later “place into context” Nazi genocidal slaughter of the Slavs. The uses of violence is both qualitatively and quantitatively different in the different scenarios; actually evicting, limiting and confining an entire group of people frequently by unrestrained use of violence based on a superior military technology, impact of disease and weight of numbers to replace them with a different culture and socio-political system can’t be considered on the same level as the occasional conflict with a neighbouring tribe. I am not sure on the specifics of this, but I also thought that one of the reasons why Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau, thought the ‘noble savage, was so, well, ‘noble’ was precisely because of the roaming, nomadic life they followed they didn’t have the same investment in a particular attachment to a specific piece of land or claim ownership in the same way but instead tended to avoid excessively intensive conflicts by migrating to another open area, rather than risking a costly escalation of tension (different notions of sexual jealousy also play a bit of a role here but that is a different matter). Lastly, the foundational moment is generally one which is always a violent one; the process of state-formation especially so. It is no use pretending otherwise; in this sense colonialism definitely becomes at home; the reconquista set the stage for later colonising, domineering and racialist policies in the New World; I am sure the basically apartheid-like legal system that the English put in place in Ireland, which really devalued the worth of an Irish life compared to an English one or redrew land rights and relegated the Irish to an inferior status, paved the way in an important sense for later colonial practises. The same thing could be said of most such later developments like slavery (white slavery in Elizabethan England and later use of white indentured labour) and the process of internal ‘othering’ and so on. The point is that none of these were really palatable and why someone would want to defend it on the grounds of later democratic functioning in the manner of Totten, seems highly immoral. The problem is that when one embarks on these kinds of justifications, where exactly is the line going to be drawn; it is not that hard to convince oneself of the utter need to wipe out the enemy and how that if any quarter is shown of given that it will be exploited and that what one is engaged in is really a war unto the death. I hate to recycle a cliché, but this is exactly what the Nazis thought they (or at least sought to convince themselves of) that they were engaged in; the Jew for them in his various guises of Bolshevik, enemy within who gives the ‘stab in the back’, corrupter of ‘German’ values, and contaminator of the Volk; posed a complete and implacable existential threat to their conception of the Nation. Force of circumstances and history demanded that for the German people to survive, no mercy should be shown and the unimaginable be imagined (hence no ‘good Jew’ arguments here) to win this racial war all previous boundaries had to be violated and crossed, as it was a question of survival. Which is why these kind of arguments, make me a little paranoid and suspicious that retrospective justifications for genocides are going to be re-warmed and served up as some bitter dish to instil the need for a kinder, gentler and reluctant but no less necessary stern steps that need to be taken in the present.

By: msg

msg — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 23:53:01 +0000

I guess it might be important somewhere to someone to know the precise difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide, but not to the people whose kinfolk are dead from them. The arrogance and intellectually indefensible posturing of anyone, including indigenous people, speaking with confidence of what the pre-European American landscape held, culturally or numerically, is staggering. And that’s recent history. Further back are only darker wisps of smoke and shadow, the compact truth of myth and bloody legend. The human experience is, and has consistently been, a progression of what gets termed savagery in its predecessor forms. We are all that, there are no innocents, only denial and forgetting. Most of what we know as peace is aftermath, or the privileged shelter inside the held perimeter of altruistic violence. Or – and this is the ideal – the truly new world, the freshness of the Pleistocene, North America without those inconvenient aborigines. There will be no greater vision for this species than the opening vista of temperate,unsettled riverine territory, seen from the harsh passes of an arduously crossed mountain range. Or after light years of empty space.

By: ahem

ahem — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 23:36:35 +0000

It always amazes me how otherwise sane people manage to ‘bracket’ the American Holocaust as being something of no relevance to the rest of history It’s linked to the appropriation of the Jewish Holocaust as a somehow profoundly American event: let’s call it a case of mass transference.