TY - JOUR
AU - Carruthers, Susan, L
AB - In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly voted to recognize genocide—the calculated attempt to destroy “in part or in whole” a cultural, national, ethnic or religious group—as a crime that international society would undertake “to prevent and to punish.” However belated an acknowledgement of the fact of mass annihilation this may have been, and however patchy ratification undoubtedly was, the Genocide Convention is nevertheless often regarded as a progressive landmark in the development of international law after World War II. Anton Weiss-Wendt sets out to deflate any such misplaced naïveté. His provocative thesis is that the term “genocide,” which we should understand as perennially encased in scare quotes, functioned as nothing more than an ideological football kicked back and forth by Washington and Moscow throughout the cold war era. Accusing one's opponent of the “supreme crime” quickly became a propaganda stratagem both superpowers deployed. But like any ball kept strenuously in play, this one soon lost air. Weiss-Wendt concludes not only that politically-motivated charges “reduced the genocide treaty into a tool of ideological warfare” (1), but that the term itself remains an “ill-conceived category for historical analysis” (170). Weiss-Wendt documents his case over the course of 170 densely packed pages. Drawing on a wide array of Russian- and English-language sources, from legal treatises to press reports and declassified official documents, he shows how relentlessly, and often spuriously, genocide was invoked over four decades of east-west antagonism. Soviet ideologues showed particular enthusiasm for wielding this new rhetorical weapon, aiming it almost invariably at the United States and its allies or proxies. Having identified domestic racism as Washington's Achilles' heel in the interwar era, Soviet propagandists seized on genocide as a force multiplier of earlier indictments of segregation, Jim Crowism, and lynching. Soviet lawyers, political leaders, and journalists decried every discriminatory practice—from poor schools and inferior public housing to miserable working conditions—as an outgrowth of genocidal intent on the part of the capitalist ruling class, aimed at annihilating black Americans. In the Vietnam era, Soviet publications characterized riots in Detroit and Chicago as instances of genocide. Meanwhile, the armed forces' disproportionately heavy recruitment of African Americans—“cannon fodder” for a genocidal war in Asia—was decried by legal scholar Alina Koroleva as a “more subtle form of genocide” (104). Here Soviet propagandists both echoed and amplified charges first made by the Civil Rights Congress, whose publication We Charge Genocide had given the Eisenhower administration pause over ratification of the Convention in the early 1950s. The Black Panthers further advanced this line of attack in the late 1960s. In the hands of determined cold warriors, genocide possessed almost infinite definitional elasticity. If the term or one of its endlessly proliferating derivatives—“elitocide,” “radiogenocide,” “biological genocide,” “industrial genocide,” “spiritual genocide,” and on—could be applied to more or less any violation of human rights, oppressive policy or act of brutality, then genocide was occurring more or less everywhere continuously. In all, the author enumerates a “good eighty countries in both hemispheres” that came to be accused of genocide over the course of the cold war (165). In ten chapters, organized along both geographic and loosely chronological lines, Weiss-Wendt attempts to name-check almost all of these instances. The result is both an exhaustive and somewhat exhausting chronicle. The predictability with which the term came to function as a super-charged accusation of wrong-doing—whether aimed at apartheid in South Africa, Israeli treatment of Palestinians, French slaughter of Algerians, American destruction of Vietnam, British repression in colonial Malaya, Kenya or in Northern Ireland—lends an air of repetitiousness to the account, despite (or because of) its global canvas. Detail is layered upon detail, to sometimes baffling effect. That Senator Estes Kefauver once likened the foot-dragging State Department to an Alphonse and Gaston comic strip is meaningful only if readers appreciate who and what these cartoon characters represented (89). In a text that presumes extensive prior knowledge on the part of its readers, names proliferate, but few distinct characters emerge. Weiss-Wendt marginalizes Raphael Lemkin, the Polish legal scholar who did so much to achieve recognition for the legal status of genocide, arguing that he was “unprepared for the reality of a bipolar world” (5). Weiss-Wendt rebukes both superpowers for their role in stripping a new category of meaning and hence of practical utility as a legal instrument. Moscow may have cried genocide more often, but the U.S. government refused to ratify the Genocide Convention until the cold war was almost over in 1988. The same white supremacist politicians and far right groups so often in Moscow's crosshairs proved the most ardent critics of ratification, adamant that subscribing to the Convention would open U.S. citizens up to prosecution at the International Court of Justice on trumped-up communist charges. The real genocide, these rabidly racist anticommunists insisted, was the calculated “mongrelization” of the white race in the United States: a program of annihilation that (they claimed) no one else but themselves took seriously (95). While Weiss-Wendt certainly does not exonerate American political actors, he clearly regards the Soviets as “more equal than others” in the debasement of genocide as a meaningful category. It took monstrous chutzpah, he insistently argues, for a state responsible for millions of deaths by starvation through collectivization, forced labor, and mass deportation to accuse anyone—let alone more or less everyone outside its own bloc—of genocide. Weiss-Wendt devotes his most withering sarcasm to skewering the balletic agility with which Soviet propagandists executed ideological pirouettes, championing, for instance, the cause of Iraq's persecuted Kurdish minority at one moment and abetting Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime the next. Yet in his eagerness to assail Soviet hypocrisy, the author sometimes seems to succumb to the very phenomenon of semantic over-stretch that he decries, regretting that Washington neglected to indict Soviet genocide in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The conspiracy-mindedness with which Moscow tied every genocide it denounced back to the United States—an invidious tendency Weiss-Wendt critiques—seems equally applicable to the way in which Washington portrayed the Kremlin as spinning a globally enmeshing “red web of conspiracy.” A common trope of the McCarthy era, propagandistic figurations of a giant Soviet spider persisted into the 1980s, when terrorism began to displace genocide in Washington's lexicon of “rhetorical crimes:” a similarly flexible label with which to stigmatize violent acts of which the labeler disapproved. Thus, while the Soviets decried Pretoria's U.S.-backed genocide in South Africa, Washington retaliated with attacks on the Kremlin-sponsored terrorism of the African National Congress and South West African People's Organisation. Weiss-Wendt laments that politicization of the term genocide meant the victims of campaigns of calculated destruction were effectively “disappeared” behind an impenetrable smokescreen of cynical hyperbole. But the marginalization of suffering as a palpable, embodied experience is also an unintended consequence of the approach pursued in A Rhetorical Crime. Pointing to the specious nature of many accusations of genocide turns the “rhetorical crime” perpetrated by the superpowers against a legal concept into a more consequential phenomenon than the myriad acts of exploitation, discrimination, and violence that fueled this point-scoring exercise. Precisely who did harm to whom, how and why, becomes ever less clear viewed through the distorting prism of cold war propaganda. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Lawfare and the Debasement of Genocide
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhz052
DA - 2020-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/lawfare-and-the-debasement-of-genocide-XGOMjOraUp
SP - 175
VL - 44
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -