Why?

I’m going to base my post around a question that’s simultaneously very obvious and very difficult to answer: why genocide? This general question breaks down into two more specific (but still very general) divisions: why do we study genocide, and why is it important to have a consistent working definition of what genocide is?

I recently realized that without a coherent narrative of our past (that is, of the human experience), the life experience of a modern humanist would be similar to what it must feel like to be the main character in the movie Memento – running around in constant pursuit of something that we can’t grasp, and compensating by pursuing the inadequate short-term goals that we can, confused, incredibly fragmented, trying to make do in a fast-moving, and almost certainly incoherent world without knowing who we are or what we want. I could have made that analogy better (a lot better), but essentially to answer the question of why we study genocide we have to first figure out why we study history at all. My contention is that we study history because it gives us a sense of who we are; it grounds our individual and national and generational experiences in something that’s both comfortingly and humblingly large. Of course, we don’t have to get the history right, and in fact it’s a lot easier and comforting to imagine it the way we would like it to be – but that isn’t often the way that things actually happened. We want to be good students of history if it matters deeply to us that we get the story right. Moving on to genocide: it’s nearly impossible to form a warm, cuddly backstory for humanity and ourselves as individuals if we do justice to the ugly, atavistic violence that we display somewhat often, and genocide (as an idea, not as a narrowly defined term) is the epitome of that darker side of what we’re capable of. Thus genocide is systematically overlooked and underestimated and put in such a tight box that almost nothing fits; defining genocide narrowly and not providing terminology for near-genocides or other mass violence lets us feel better about us. In short, we study genocide because we can’t hope to understand humanity wholly without understanding why and how we occasionally kill millions of each other without military provocation.

Whether it is important that we have a term to distinguish various such acts from each other is a different question, and while that discussion seems to trump the previous one in our readings (and therefore probably in academia in general), it seems like a less important one: genocide is the epitome of what we’re capable of, and I suspect that at root much of the volume of this latter debate is an (unconscious) attempt to narrow the scope of the answer to that question through limited and limiting phraseology. In the context of why we study genocide – essentially, in terms of what we’re looking for – it matters very little whether we can apply x number of the same terms to what happened in Germany (and elsewhere) to the Jews and what happened in Ukraine under Stalin. There is some intellectual merit to be found, however, if in our comparative discussion we keep the importance of that discussion firmly in context – which many of the authors we have read struggle to achieve. That merit is to be found not in whether one atrocity is “worse” or “better” than another, but in comparing the unique political, economic, and social conditions that shaped and were then shaped by atrocities, and attempting to draw out patterns – not because conscientious current or future states will be wary of their own “red flags,” but so that we as individuals find ourselves on the right side of history if confronted with extremely subtle but extremely important choices – so that we don’t listen to everyone with a lab coat or chevrons on their sleeve or an American flag pin on their lapel.