THE NEXUS BETWEEN GENOCIDE AND WAR: Last night, I watched “The Pianist”. Again. The first time was back at the beginning of the month, in Johannesburg. But last night, my spouse brought the video home from the video store. So I decided to sit down and watch it again, with him.
It is a remarkable, gut-wrenching movie. Adrien Brody has such a haunting, haunted face, and plays the expressions on it like a true maestro. The story only occasionally seemed overdone. (A couple of tropes apparently borrowed from other people’s trails of tears: the Gestapo-forcing-the-Jews-to-dance thing; the woman-who-had-to-smother-her-own-baby thing. But who knows? Maybe those were in Szpilman’s original book, and before that, in his life. In which case, forget what I said about tropes.*)
Generally, the movie takes you right along with Vladek as his family is squeezed by the Nazis’ ever-increasing encroachments on their lives and liberties. He loses everyone and everything around him. And he gains– well, he gains an other-worldly personal affect even as the story of what happens to him becomes more and more “fantastickal”. As well as deadly true and truly deadly.
The movie almost takes you inside the experience of being the survivor of a genocide. Of course, as I watched it, I remembered survivors’ narratives that I heard from people I interviewed last year, in Rwanda. In some of the movie’s early scenes, firstly as ever more and more restrictions were placed on Warsaw’s Jews, and then as they were herded into the tight confines of the ghetto, I thought of the current travails of my Palestinian friends…
But the movie also reminded me of something I first started reflecting on some weeks ago: namely, that while hate-inciters and other various assorted sickoes can be found in every society, it seems to be only in the circumstances of an all-out war that such people and grouplets actually get to act out the full sickness of their genocidal ambitions.
I think this feels like a fairly significant insight. Think of Germany, think of Rwanda, think of Saddam’s Anfal campaign. All of them carried out under the “fog of war”.
This is NOT to say, at all, that genocide is “just another one of the things that gets to happen in war.” It is NOT just another “excess” of the war situation. It deserves to be treated seriously, and with deep opprobrium. (There is something in me that says that the twice-over intentionality that is built into all the international-law definitions of genocide may, however, be a bit overblown. The central tragedy of a genocide seems to me to be–as Gerard Prunier remarked in a discussion I had with him in 2001, that it wipes out “everything that might be a vehicle through which a person might hope to leave any personal legacy in the world.” But then, if your entire ethnic or religious or whatever kind of group ends up getting wiped out because of, say, avoidable famine or some such cause, does that feel any different to a victim from being wiped out because someone hates your particular group? I don’t think so. Indeed, you could say that being genocided because of intention pays the target group more heed–even if heed of the most hateful kind–than being genocided out of sheer inattention…)
Be that as it may.
I postulate that the reason for the nexus between genocide and war is because, in time of war, so many of people’s “normal” inhibitions–and primarily, the normal inhibition against killing– have to be suppressed. This then allows sick individuals and grouplets who advocate genocidal, mass killings to gain a much wider and more sympathetic hearing than they could ever get in normal times. Plus, there is all the fear and hysteria of war-time discourse: the frequently exaggerated fears of hostile “fifth columns” whose members–often thought in many people’s minds to be members of a certain rethnic or religious group– need to be rooted out. Etc., etc.
So here’s a simple policy prescription. If this nexus exists, then one very effect way to “prevent” genocide– an obligation that the 1948 Genocide Convention lays on all members of the international community– would be to prevent war.
Tell me what YOU think.
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I think that in order to comment fully on your ideas, we would have to further qualify words like “war” and “genocide.”
What would you call the actions occuring in the Darfur region now? Is it a war, or just a “genocide” without war? Because if it is, then your proposition is unfortunately flawed. And then again, the use of the word “genocide” requires a very high degree of specific knowledge. Most of the civilians involved apparently have been scared/forced from their homes to refugee camps where they may indeed die from starvation and disease. But did the instigators or leaders of the Janjaweed have this in mind?
Ok, to what I really wanted to write. Your simple prescription apart from being perhaps too “simple,” (in terms of a philosophical argument) raises the question of global stability as a policy goal of the U.N. (At least I think that is what you are suggesting; talk of the prevention of war by various officials at different times sometimes seems to be a cover for indifferent inaction, or political realpolitik) While on the whole, global stability includes both peace and justice, in some cases, like Morroco’s Western Sahara, the non-autonomous province of Tibet, the protectorate of Lebanon, it can be a prescription for long term instability (Tibet is probably a bad example, with the almost total transformation of the area to majority Chinese population, and the present Lama’s persistently lowered international status, I doubt that there will be instability in the future let alone much “noise” concerning the issue) or even continuing atrocities.
I agree wholeheartedly that there is a connection between war and the willingness to demonize the other due to various false or true exingencies, and therefore both countries and citizens should work together to find common ground through the extensive alternatives with which we have recourse.
But, I dare to say, wars can be legitimate and can stop many things including genocide.
Therefore, we are forced, among other things, to ruminate on the validity, efficacy and procedural/moral dimensions concerning Humanitarian Intervention.