Last week I asked a question in class before the blog discussion that probably could have taken an entire period to come to two dozen conclusions and zero definitive answers. As academia is wont to do. The question pondered if an extremely small group of people--like 5 or less--who held some unique ethnic or cultural identity were systematically eliminated by a government would that constitute genocide? More simply, is there a threshold of death to genocide?
Today in my English Tutorial class I was reminded of this question by the presentation of a classmate's project. It had nothing to do with genocide but in passing she mentioned that Peter Pan's Lost Boys don't share his eternal youth and are recycled over time. J.M. Barrie leaves it unclear where the "graduated" Lost Boys disappear to, opening the possibility that Peter systematically murders them when they reach a certain age.
Now, while there's no denying that such a suggestion is a little fucked up given how cute and innocent the Lost Boys are in the Disney edition, I promise there's some credence to it, provided we accept the theory of the older boys' demise. Peter Pan is in many ways a dictator while the Lost Boys are a cultural nation of displaced children. They obey Pan unquestioningly and go to remarkable lengths to please him, like attempting to murder the "Wendy-bird" on Tinkerbell's command. Pan forbids them to know anything that he doesn't, effectively controlling the flow of knowledge in this small society and maintaining his dominance. However, the one thing Peter can't control is the memories of their parents, and their expectation to grow up. This is the greatest imaginable subversion to the Pan dream, and one that Peter cannot tolerate. Assuming the disappearance of the Lost Boys is due to ideological murder, can we deem this genocide? I think we can. Sure, they are abnormally small in number but their murders are predicated on Peter Pan's defense of his ideal of eternal youth. Can we not see growing up as a form of cultural uniqueness--as something to be feared and destroyed? Or are the Lost Boys too few in number or too integral to the political system to be otherized. Are Pan's murders better connoted to Hitler's Holocaust or Stalin's political purges?
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