Lisa Pine: Genocide ... twentieth-century warnings for the twenty-first century
[Lisa Pine is Senior Lecturer in History in the Department of Social and Policy Studies at London South Bank University. She is author of Nazi Family Policy, 1933-1945 (Berg, 1997) and Hitler's 'National Community': Society and Culture in Nazi Germany (Hodder Arnold, 2007), as well as several scholarly articles on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. She currently teaches a course on genocide in the twentieth century. pinel@lsbu.ac.uk]
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish-Jewish jurist, coined the term genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). He believed that each national, religious and racial group had a mission to fulfil and a cultural contribution to make to mankind. He defined genocide as 'the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group'. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) stated that: 'genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such'. These genocidal acts encompassed not only 'killing members of the group', but also 'causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group', 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part', 'imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group' and 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'.
Many scholars have concurred that the twentieth century was the century of genocide. The state-sponsored mass murder of civilians in the First World War and the Second World War set a pattern to be repeated many times in different regions of the world in the second half of the century. Will the twenty-first century be any different? If genocides continue to take place, what should the response to them be?...
Gregory Stanton, President of Genocide Watch, argues that genocide is a process that develops in eight stages. He asserts that the stages are predictable and that preventive measures can be taken at each stage.
The first stage, classification, entails the distinction of people into different groups. This is a categorisation of 'them and us', based upon race, religion, nationality or ethnicity. The second stage, symbolisation, entails the naming of groups as 'other' and distinguishing them or marking them out from the rest of society. Symbols are often forced upon 'enemy' groups, such as the Yellow Star to be worn by German Jews under Nazi rule. The third stage is dehumanisation, the denial of the humanity of the target group. Its members are vilified as vermin, pests, diseases or even inanimate objects. This process of dehumanisation makes murder somehow more acceptable, legitimate or even necessary in the eyes of the perpetrators. The fourth stage is the organisation. Genocide is always intentional, planned and orchestrated from above, often executed by specially-trained militias. In Nazi-occupied Europe the SS-Einsatzgruppen were specially-trained killing squads who shot to death more than 1.5 million Jews in the Soviet Union. In Rwanda, the interhamwe militias perpetrated the mass killings, and in Darfur since 2004 the Janjaweed militias have done the same.
Polarisation is the fifth stage of the genocide process. Groups in society are separated, for example, by the banning of marriage or social interaction. The enemy group is alienated and isolated. As well as targeting members of the enemy group, extremists also target moderates from their own group, who are most likely to want to avoid genocide. Moderate leaders may be among the first to be arrested and murdered. The sixth stage is preparation. This involves the physical separation of members of the enemy group and/or their forced deportation. This segregation, confinement or removal to, or from, a particular area is a significant moment. The term 'ethnic cleansing' has been applied to this process. The seventh stage of the genocide process is the mass killings themselves. The perpetrators regard this as 'extermination', because the victims have been dehumanised in an earlier stage of the process. The eighth stage in the process of genocide is denial. The perpetrators deny their crimes and try to hide the evidence. They endeavour to prevent investigations of their crimes. Many perpetrators remain in power until forcibly removed. They go into exile unless and until they are caught and tried.
The fundamental problem with intervention at the early stages is that it is difficult for the international community to intervene in the domestic affairs of states. The necessary steps of prevention at early stages such as the promotion of universalistic institutions that transcend racial or ethnic divisions within a society or state, the banning or denial of symbolisation, the outlawing of hate propaganda and the banning of militias can only be achieved by the state itself. And the state, of course, may be unwilling to do this. So what can the international community do? Essentially, it must determine effective means of placing significant pressure on such states and escalate such pressure if the situation deteriorates....
Read entire article at History and Policy (UK)
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish-Jewish jurist, coined the term genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944). He believed that each national, religious and racial group had a mission to fulfil and a cultural contribution to make to mankind. He defined genocide as 'the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group'. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) stated that: 'genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such'. These genocidal acts encompassed not only 'killing members of the group', but also 'causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group', 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part', 'imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group' and 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'.
Many scholars have concurred that the twentieth century was the century of genocide. The state-sponsored mass murder of civilians in the First World War and the Second World War set a pattern to be repeated many times in different regions of the world in the second half of the century. Will the twenty-first century be any different? If genocides continue to take place, what should the response to them be?...
Gregory Stanton, President of Genocide Watch, argues that genocide is a process that develops in eight stages. He asserts that the stages are predictable and that preventive measures can be taken at each stage.
The first stage, classification, entails the distinction of people into different groups. This is a categorisation of 'them and us', based upon race, religion, nationality or ethnicity. The second stage, symbolisation, entails the naming of groups as 'other' and distinguishing them or marking them out from the rest of society. Symbols are often forced upon 'enemy' groups, such as the Yellow Star to be worn by German Jews under Nazi rule. The third stage is dehumanisation, the denial of the humanity of the target group. Its members are vilified as vermin, pests, diseases or even inanimate objects. This process of dehumanisation makes murder somehow more acceptable, legitimate or even necessary in the eyes of the perpetrators. The fourth stage is the organisation. Genocide is always intentional, planned and orchestrated from above, often executed by specially-trained militias. In Nazi-occupied Europe the SS-Einsatzgruppen were specially-trained killing squads who shot to death more than 1.5 million Jews in the Soviet Union. In Rwanda, the interhamwe militias perpetrated the mass killings, and in Darfur since 2004 the Janjaweed militias have done the same.
Polarisation is the fifth stage of the genocide process. Groups in society are separated, for example, by the banning of marriage or social interaction. The enemy group is alienated and isolated. As well as targeting members of the enemy group, extremists also target moderates from their own group, who are most likely to want to avoid genocide. Moderate leaders may be among the first to be arrested and murdered. The sixth stage is preparation. This involves the physical separation of members of the enemy group and/or their forced deportation. This segregation, confinement or removal to, or from, a particular area is a significant moment. The term 'ethnic cleansing' has been applied to this process. The seventh stage of the genocide process is the mass killings themselves. The perpetrators regard this as 'extermination', because the victims have been dehumanised in an earlier stage of the process. The eighth stage in the process of genocide is denial. The perpetrators deny their crimes and try to hide the evidence. They endeavour to prevent investigations of their crimes. Many perpetrators remain in power until forcibly removed. They go into exile unless and until they are caught and tried.
The fundamental problem with intervention at the early stages is that it is difficult for the international community to intervene in the domestic affairs of states. The necessary steps of prevention at early stages such as the promotion of universalistic institutions that transcend racial or ethnic divisions within a society or state, the banning or denial of symbolisation, the outlawing of hate propaganda and the banning of militias can only be achieved by the state itself. And the state, of course, may be unwilling to do this. So what can the international community do? Essentially, it must determine effective means of placing significant pressure on such states and escalate such pressure if the situation deteriorates....