Genocide and Raphael Lemkin

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.