A Conference
was held in Geneva on the 20 June 2012 to launch the Raphael Lemkin
International Prize for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities. I was
asked to make a few concluding remarks.
What is profoundly shocking, deeply disturbing about
the Nazi genocide is that it employed the methods and instruments of the modern
state for utterly evil ends. What I have in mind here is the impersonal,
detached functioning of a modern state bureaucracy, its methods of
organisation, communication, maintaining registers, transport, logistics – all
aspects of Weber’s legal-rationality – which are then deployed for mass killing.
We know from the Milgram experiment that hierarchy,
command and authority are often sufficient to override individual conscience,
resulting in the dehumanisation of the victims, if authority so commands.
Zygmunt Bauman (building on Adorno) makes it clear
that the Holocaust was not inexplicable or incommensurable, but can be
understood as one possible outcome of modernity, namely the industrialisation
of killing.
All this is profoundly disturbing, because it wholly
undermines the Enlightenment assumption (a) that there is a single humanity -
it undermines the idea of a single humanity, because genocide is irrefutable evidence
that one human group perfectly capable is seeking to exterminate another. (b) That
rationality is benign and (c) that history is moving towards something
progressive, with a positive outcome (this last is deeply encoded in Marxism,
liberalism and Christianity).
Hence there is the impossible, intolerable conclusion
that rationality can result in dystopia – this necessarily questions the entire
Enlightenment project and places an intolerable burden on Europe and the West;
hence the propensity to argue that the Holocaust was absolute and an anomaly,
there was never any event that could (and should) be compared with it.
However appalling it was, nevertheless we should not
be mesmerised by Auschwitz (and I think this was Lemkin’s position), we should
not lose sight of the world’s historical experience both before and since the
Holocaust, that there have been mass killings that relied only partly on the
instruments of modernity. Thus we can cite mass killings where the methods of
modernity established the possibility by collecting the victims using the methods
of modernity, but the actual killing was personal and non-industrial.
Lemkin himself accepted the mass killings in the
Soviet Union under Stalin as falling under the same category of genocide,
notably the Holodomor in Ukraine; Timothy Snyder’s work, in his book Bloodlands, shows that millions of
people were starved to death or were shot, including Jewish Holocaust victims.
We can further cite Rwanda, Cambodia, Jugoslavia both in 1945 and during the
early 1990s, Mao Tse-tung’s famine and others.
Should we be relieved that the majority of mass
killings and genocide used methods that we were only partly the instruments of
modernity? Hardly.
Lemkin’s legacy, then, is that the Enlightenment
may have encoded the promise of universal reason, but history has overridden
this, that the instruments of reason are neutral as between rationality and
irrationality, and can be deployed for wholly evil purposes in an entirely
rational way. It is essential that we confront this proposition, however uncomfortable that may be. Lemkin did.
Sch.Gy.
