The Genocide Game
International Courts And Institutions Have Denuded The Concept Of Genocide Of Its Meaning
In contemporary geopolitics the charge of genocide has become hijacked by moral entrepreneurs who masquerade as disinterested human rights experts or as unbiased members of the international judiciary. These entrepreneurs pose as individuals who possess the expertise to pronounce on issues such as human rights. Supported by the international Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) complex, these experts have succeeded in gaining significant prestige and influence over transnational decision-making. There has never been so much transnational judicial activism and much of this is focused on supposed human rights violations and on the issue of genocide. In public life the charge of genocide is no longer based on carefully sifting through the evidence. The charge of genocide is casually hurled at opponents.
The casual attribution of genocide to events that in the past would have been described as a violent conflict is the accomplishment of zealous judicial activists, who are devoted to inventing arguments for charging particular states, governments and institutions with this crime. Numerous NGOs and International Courts are always on the look-out for a genocide case- no matter how weak and tendentious its evidential basis. These days they don’t have to look very hard. Nor do they need to be particularly scrupulous about the strength of their evidence.
International Institutions have become intensely politicised and have weaponised the sense of horror evoked by images of genocide. The recent decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to charge Benjamin Netanyahu the Prime Minister of Israel and one of his ministerial colleagues with the crime of genocide is a scandalous example of the current wave of genocide-mongering[i]. That this supposed independent body decided to serve as a global megaphone for the anti-Israeli crusade signifies the capture of international courts by judicial activists
It matters not whether Netanyahu will be actually prosecuted or found guilty by the ICC. What matters is that an international court was prepared to brand Israel with the infamy of possessing a genocidal prime minister responsible for committing war crimes. Whatever happens the harm has been done. The ICC has knowingly assisted Hamas in striking a propaganda coup against Israel.
The ICC’s propagandist operational style is highlighted by the role and mode of behaviour of the panel of experts it relied on to justify its persecution of Israel. The six human rights lawyers that made up the ICC’s ‘panel of experts’ were anything but impartial. As an article in The Telegraph reported many of these supposedly impartial experts have made public statements sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and others were known to be critical of Israeli policies in the past[ii]. As the astute commentator, Melanie Phillips wrote in The Times, the ICC is ‘stuffed with radical “human rights” lawyers who are no friends of Israel’. She adds that ‘this “impartial” panel is actually a hanging jury from the Salem school of law: verdict first, evidence nowhere’[iii].
Israel is not the only target of the international genocide industry. Last week the United Nations General Assembly voted to establish an annual day of remembrance for the 1995 Srebrenica genocide[iv]. That the resolution was proposed by Germany and Rwanda indicates the hypocritical motive that informed this initiative. Both countries – but especially Germany – are associated with a horrific episode of genocide. For Germany evoking memories of Srebrenica provides an opportunity to demonstrate its moral rehabilitation. That is why already in the 1990s, Germany was in the forefront of demonising Serbia. No doubt the Serbs like the other parties in the old Yugoslavia committed criminal atrocities during a bloody civil war. But to represent the atrocities committed at Srebrenica as an example of genocide is an act of bad faith.
There is no clearer example of genocide mongering than an editorial on Srebrenica published by The Guardian in July 2005. It stated that:
‘Few people outside of the Balkans had heard of Srebrenica before the eastern Bosnian town first registered as a place of horror and shame that ranked alongside Auschwitz in the catalogue of man’s inhumanity to man’.
Today, when the word Holocaust has become an everyday idiom of condemnation we are used to the rhetoric of ‘just like Auschwitz’. But a quarter of a century ago – when the killing of up to 8000 civilians at Srebrenica was coupled with the mass murder committed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz- it was still at an early stage in the evolution of the genocide industry.
Last week’s UN resolution serves to remind the world yet again of Serbia’s pariah status. The way that the massacre of Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica is framed is to relive the burden of guilt from all the other parties involved in the civil-war in Yugoslavia. Atrocities were committed on all sides, but the Serbs alone must carry the burden of being represented as a genocidal community.
It is likely that the resolution passed by the United Nations will open a Pandora’s Box of claims and counterclaims about more and more instances of genocide. Genocide mongering is cheap and these days virtually every instance of high casualty killings committed within the context ethnic or national conflict stands a good chance of being branded as an act of genocide.
The carelessness with which the charge of genocide is mounted against a variety of targets stands in sharp contrast to the cautious way that this issue was handled in the 1940s. Unlike today, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the word genocide was used with precision and great care. In 1948, the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined it as ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’[v]. The emphasis of this definition was on intent; the intent to exterminate a people. Unlike today, acts of ethnic violence or the inflicting of large civilian casualties did not meet the criterion of an intent exterminate a people and were therefore not considered as examples of genocide.
For many decades after the 1948 convention most commentators confined the use of genocide to the case of the Holocaust and to the massacre of Armenian people by the Turks in the early part of the 20th century. However, since the 1990s the term genocide has become trivialised and denuded of its original meaning. There is a constant attempt to expand the meaning of genocide. In November 2023, six western states - Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK- united to put forward a joint application before the ICC to expand the meaning of genocide[vi]. No doubt the panel of experts who swish to implicate the Prime Minister of Israel with the crime of genocide have internalised the spirit driving the concept creep of this crime of crimes.
The concept creep of genocide
The promiscuous use of the term genocide has even crept into everyday discourse. It has become an intensely politicised term that is constantly and irresponsibly used to score a point. Accusations of genocide proliferate, and NGOs and other advocacy organisations attempt to draw attention to their cause by asserting that their constituency is the victim of genocide. That is why in recent years there has been a flourishing of genocide related terms. For example, moral entrepreneurs have invented the term cultural genocide, which can mean just about anything. It is suggested that cultural genocide is ‘the intentional destruction of a culture’. According to its authors, this form of genocide ‘does not necessarily involve killing or violence against members of the group in question. The term can be used to refer to ‘the eradication of cultural activities, artifacts, language and traditions’[vii].
Canada’s system of residential school for Indigenous people has been condemned as genocidal. No doubt these schools were at times cruel and oppressive. But genocidal? The Canadian Parliament voted to say yes and asserted that genocide was the right term to characterise the actions of these residential schools[viii]. In the case of Canada, genocide- mongering has acquired the character of a quasi-religious crusade. In July 2021 the Canadian Historical Association published a ‘Canada Day Statement’ that asserted that there was a consensus among historians that Canada had engaged in genocide against its Indigenous peoples, and arguably was still doing so![ix] In this instance genocide has been cast into the role of an ever-present ongoing phenomenon!
The term cultural genocide can also be deployed to highlight the consequence of the destruction of the natural environment on the ground that it prevents ‘people from following their traditional way of life’. Identity advocacy groups, have turned genocide into an all-purpose trope for advertising the gravity of their suffering. Transgender genocide or trans genocide draws attention to the supposed elevation of the violence against transgender people[x]. The genocide identity is claimed by a variety of groups who insist that their suffering in the past merits the use of this term. Thus for some the terrible Irish Famine has been rebranded as the Irish Genocide or as Ireland’s Holocaust[xi].
Some academics go so far as to extend the application of the term genocide to the victimisation of animals. According to one account:
‘Social vitality is important to the lives of some nonhuman animals and its forcible diminishment results in social death for those nonhuman groups. Thus, instances of violence that inflict social death among nonhuman animals are genocide. By recognizing that nonhumans are, in fact, rendered victims of genocide through human violence against them, we challenge the anthropocentric bias that is fundamental to all genocidal perpetration’[xii].
The ease with which a concept that was used to refer to exceptional acts of violence designed to eradicate a people could expand to the cover the world of animals highlights the irrational manner in which this term is used. It also shows that the strong demand for the acquisition of the genocide brand means that it will be discovered in the most unlikely of places.
It is the moral disorientation of society that creates the demand for the genocide brand. We live in a world that struggles to distinguish between right and wrong and good and evil. In order to recreate such moral contrasts contemporary society has sought refuge in the extremes. That is why terms like Slavery, Genocide and Holocaust, Crime Against Humanity are used with increasing frequency. The use of these terms provides a moral contrast that flatters groups and individuals. For the political hustler playing the genocide-card has become irresistable.
The concept creep of the meaning of genocide is fuelled by the work of researchers, academics and human rights experts who discover new sources and examples of this crime. The quality of research that underpins their work is characterised by sloppy ahistorical comparisons and by banal slippery slope arguments. Take the book Extraordinary Evil: A Short Walk to Genocide (2007)[xiii]. In this book, the author Barbara Colorose asserts that school bullying is the first step to an act of genocide. She contends that the ‘impulse to bully is mirrored by the act of genocide’. When bullying is coupled with genocide it becomes evident that the original meaning of the concept has disintegrated to the point that it has become a banal cliché. The blurb advertising this book states;
‘Based on the author's 15 years of research and extensive travel, Extraordinary Evil is an urgently needed work in an age when acts of genocide seem to occur more frequently and are in the public's consciousness more than ever before’.
The assertion that we ‘work in an age when acts of genocide seem to occur more frequently and are in the public's consciousness more than ever before’, serves as a testimony to the power of genocide-mongering. Genocides seem to occur with greater and greater frequency because the human rights industry has succeeded in associating normal forms of mass violence with this label. It has created a chain of random associations with this term, so it is not surprising that genocide is in the public’s consciousness more than before.
The proliferation of genocide rhetoric is a symptom of the climate of moral illiteracy that permeates the western world. It serves to retrospectively turn the real Holocaust into just another ordinary run-of-the-mill genocide and confuse people with what is happening in the current era. It also serves to mystify the meaning of violent wars and conflict. Mass killing of people is always to be condemned but not as an act of genocide but as an act of barbarity.
The willingness of international institutions to turn genocide into a political football demonstrates that they are unreliable institutions for the realisation of justice. They have clearly lost their way and serve as political instruments of lobbies and vested interests. The ICC, in particular works as a cosmopolitan kangaroo court whose pronouncements cannot be trusted.
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[i] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/21/british-lawyers-netanyahu-war-crimes-icc-amal-clooney/
[ii] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/21/british-lawyers-netanyahu-war-crimes-icc-amal-clooney/
[iii] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/wickedly-perverse-move-should-sink-the-icc-js9h8h65h
[iv] https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240523-un-establish-srebrenica-genocide-memorial-day-despite-opposition-serbia
[v] chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/unts/volume%2078/volume-78-i-1021-english.pdf
[vii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_genocide
[viii] https://nationalpost.com/opinion/christopher-dummitt-expanding-meaning-of-genocide-wont-elucidate-residential-school-harms
[ix] https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/debating-genocide-in-canada-a-response-to-steven-high/
1. [x] Jones, Adam (2017). Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (3rd ed.). London: Routledge. pp. 637–639.
[xi] https://www.genocidewatchblog.com/post/an-gorta-m%C3%B3r-the-question-of-the-irish-genocide
[xii] https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/11401/#:~:text=Social%20vitality%20is%20important%20to,among%20nonhuman%20animals%20are%20genocide.
[xiii] https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Evil-Short-Walk-Genocide/dp/1568583710
Language is a huge issue - talking control of our language a big challenge for us.
Yes- the meaning of many words has mutated into something that bears little relationship to its original meaning