My post concerns the relationship between war and genocide. Levene’s “types” of war are relevant: this somewhat odd little article sums them up nicely: article. Simply, I believe that Levene and to a greater degree we in our class have drawn a too hard line between war and genocide. Levene’s three types of war come one step closer to drawing war on the genocide spectrum, but his first type is naïve and merits closer inspection. Levene calls it “the standard notion of war,” but it would more accurately be labeled “the gentleman’s wishful notion of war.”
There might be specific strategic goals that nations make war (in the first type) to achieve – a waterway, an industrial sector, particular natural resources – and at the end of most wars like these both parties come together to sort out the pieces. While the war is in full swing, however, each nation gets swept up in the goal of total elimination of the opposing nation, not merely the opposing state. The only way to ensure victory is to eliminate a people, or at least their identity as such. The article offers relations between Britain and Germany in WWII as a classic example of type one warfare, but those relations in fact stretch the assumptions of type one warfare as being far from genocide.
The article states: “In genocide, the enemy is not a competitor that must be conquered. In the mind of the perpetrator, the enemy is a wholly alien “other” – the sinister force behind society’s ills – that must be utterly destroyed. In genocide the enemy is diabolical.” To call the combat between Britain (and the US) and Germany during WWII simply a war of geopolitical competition between states, and to reserve for genocide the construction of a “diabolical” enemy, is to ignore the efforts of all parties involved to eliminate civilians (there is no reason to think that if any party involved had a button that would kill every citizen of the opposing nation, they would not have pressed it), and also the expectation among the allies, explored in Waller’s article on the “Mad Nazi theory,” that the architects of the German war effort and genocide were suffering from something almost classifiable as a mental disease. The occupation of Germany by the US and Soviet Union serves to challenge Levene’s claim that “the states are enemies only for the duration of the war,” and points at something (ironically) not dissimilar to cultural genocide.
Portraying war as potentially much cleaner than genocide – something resulting from entirely different psychological mechanisms – and contained between two states in competition – is to deny the horror of war and gloss over, in retrospect, the role of war in the instigation, process, and results of the genocides in Germany and even the Ottoman empire. Could the Armenians have been the “supreme enemy” of the Ottomans if what sparked the genocidal flame was Armenians fighting for the Russians? Classifying war simply as genocide is to dilute the term unnecessarily and misleadingly, but to leave war off of the spectrum of crimes against humanity is merely an attempt to deny our susceptibility to the psychological mechanisms of genocide.
Mr. Hay argues that Levene – as well as our class – makes too strong a distinction between war and genocide. Hay writes that genocide is more accurately described as located at one extreme of a spectrum of crimes against humanity.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the second point, but not the first. A clear difference exists between war and genocide – intent. The legal definition of genocide, which specifies the intent to destroy a group of people as such in whole or in part, and of crimes against humanity, which does not specify the degree or scope of intent, clarifies this point.
The article essentially makes this argument, though in slightly different terminology, when it talks about the psycho-social aspect that differentiates genocide from war. The line between genocide and war might become blurry, as Mr. Hay points out, due to the tendency of states to dehumanize the enemy to gain support for the war and break down people’s (namely, soldiers’) inherent predisposition against violence and killing. However, a distinction can still be made between the demonization of a group in order to conduct a military operation that is itself a means to another ends – territory, resources, etc. – and the destruction of a group as an end in and of itself. The situation Mr. Hay says blurs the line between genocide and war is actually a crime against humanity. The legal definition of crimes against humanity includes “murder; extermination; torture; rape; political, racial, or religious persecution and other inhumane acts… only if they are part of a widespread or systematic practice.” Perhaps the international community fails to identify and prosecute an unconscionable number of these crimes.
The importance of intent can help rather than prevent imagining a spectrum of crimes against humanity. While genocide seems to fall under this definition, it is legally a separate crime that requires a particular intent – arguably one that makes it worse than a crime against humanity. A possible scale would delineate different types of crimes under international law on the basis of their maliciousness of intent, though each type of crime would still be a discrete entity.
To play devil's advocate, I will argue that the destruction of an enemy nation, or 'cultural genocide' is not necessarily a bad thing using the context, as Mr. Hay does, of the Second World War. Let me first propose that the Allies did actively pursue a policy of cultural genocide against Nazi Germany. They hoped to eliminate Nazi leadership and culture from German society. They recognized that the continuation of a thoroughly Nazi state would only lead to greater death and destruction both within Germany and throughout the world. The Allies intentionally wrought extreme devastation upon German from the air, sea, and land in order to end the war as quickly as possible, ruin any German national pride, and quash sympathy towards those who brought them into the war. After the war, Germany was 'de-Nazified;' an obvious attempt to permanently annihilate Nazi culture. Have we not called events similar to this cultural genocide in class? Yet is cultural genocide inherently evil?
ReplyDeleteAccording to R.J. Rummel, Nazi Germany slaughtered approximately 21 million unarmed people (The Dark Side of Democracy 4). German bombers and secret weapons bombarded British population centers until formal surrender. In the last days of the war, concentration camp guards forced surviving prisoners to walk for days on little to no food. Does a culture so focused on killing ‘the other’ even in its last hours truly deserve to survive? Absolutely not. Was it wrong of the Allies to have committed this ‘cultural genocide’ against Nazi Germany to shorten the war and ensure that the Germany would accept its guilt after the war? No. As historians-in-the-making, we need to look at decisions through a complex lens, taking into account every variable we can. Though the Allies did commit some war crimes, in no way did they match the scale or intensity of the Axis powers (see William Hitchcock’s The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe for further reading). Though awful that some potentially innocent German civilians died, more innocent civilians would have died had the Allies not 'committed genocide' against Nazi culture.
Mr. Lemkin has no idea the curse he laid on academia with this line-drawing debacle we have on our hands here. Of course, Mr. Lemkin's definition is far more inclusive than the popular conception and, somewhat unfortunately, is wholly impractical to accept for international law. As a huge opponent to academic word invention I hate saying this, but I feel it's almost necessary to have different words for the destruction of culture and the extermination of people. African-Americans have not been systematically, lawfully murdered but for long periods of time their culture--music, art, even dialect--has. Yet a new term does not completely resolve the pesky complication of war. Or, as Mr. Hay very aptly deems it, "the gentleman's wishful notion of war". While I don't agree that total war necessarily entices a whole populace to seek eradication of an enemy, people are obviously competitive and not too eager to lose a war. However, when you lose a legitimate war it should be your government, not you, who dies. Wars, in the gentleman's wishful notion, are fought by and against governments, not people. I appreciate Ms. Mills revisiting of the intent issue because I believe I have found the line! No, I haven't, but here's a suggestion: When a government seeks to bring the war to the people--without the explicit intention to undermine the enemy state--then we can start thinking about applying the genocide tag. For instance, the atomic bomb: not genocidal, both were dropped to expedite surrender. My Lai: I mean, what the hell, those women and children weren't at all relevant to the state or its army, they just got shot up because some butthole commander was having a bad day. It rattled American cages more than it did Vietnamese. When people die in wars out of uniform, it should make the enemy state teeter, not just really pissed off. There's issues with this too, but I'm gonna go ahead and let someone else get into them.
ReplyDelete