I have decided to use the occasion, with the philosopher Larry May, to think about genocide more widely.
“ [….] Thinking of the Holocaust is useful as a vivid reminder of the way that genocide produces strikingly horrendous suffering of humans, most of whom are innocent and many of whom are children. It is difficult to think of genocide without thinking of the paradigm cases of genocide, and especially the Holocaust. There is ample evidence that those responsible for drafting the Genocide Convention, which occurred only a few years after the end of the Second World War, were similarly and strongly influenced by the Holocaust. If one were Jewish and living in Central Europe in the early 1940s there would surely be very few if any losses that one could experience that are worse than what would have been lost had the anticipated annihilation of the entire Jewish people by the Nazi government been successful. And even without the completion of the ‘Final Solution,’ the sheer number of deaths and untold misery caused by the Nazis in their attempt to destroy the Jewish people is nearly unparalleled in human history and stands as a stark example of all that is horrible about genocide.
Many subsequent instances of genocide have involved large-scale complicity within the larger population, where even the relatives of the victims are often complicit. Many will object that the Holocaust is different, and I will be the first to agree. As Hannah Arendt and others have argued, there was some complicity among some Jewish leaders in the Holocaust, but this was undoubtedly not on the scale that has occurred in other genocides. And the ‘evil’ that was manifest in the Holocaust did not have the same kind of ambiguity than many other genocides have had. Indeed, when people visit Auschwitz or the other death camps, many are literally sickened by what they see. The conclusion seems obvious: international law must deal directly with the perpetrators of genocides such as the Holocaust, if there are any others, in the clearest terms, for this type of wrong is certainly among the worst. Yet … it is not always clear who is responsible for what has occurred in many recent genocides.
If we … think of genocide and the Holocaust as inextricably intertwined then it will be easier to understand why many have seen genocide as the worst of all possible international crimes. In general I do not disagree … about keeping paradigm cases in mind when we examine a moral concept. Yet it is also true that the concept of genocide has been, and is currently being, used for many cases other than the Holocaust. I do not dispute that we should see the Holocaust as one of the most horrible moral atrocities of all time. But insofar as genocide covers more than one case, indeed more than even its main exemplar, we cannot rest with the easy task of explaining the moral wrong of the Holocaust alone to understand the much larger concept of genocide. The alternative … is to look first at the exemplar but then also at the whole range of phenomena that fall under the concept of genocide.
Paying too much attention to the exemplar of the Holocaust may make it difficult to understand the rest of the phenomena, especially insofar as the rest of the phenomena may not elicit the visceral condemnation that is elicited in considering the Holocaust. As I said, I am not opposed to the idea that exemplars and paradigm cases can often elucidate a concept. But if these cases are too closely associated with the concept, it becomes very difficult to know how to deal with other cases that also seemingly fall under the concept. Concepts are larger than the individual instances that fall under them. And, it should go without saying, the category of genocide is larger than the Holocaust.
There is also a problem with the way the definition of genocide was so closely tied to the Holocaust. … I [earlier] argued that the definition of genocide, with a list of only four groups than can be the object of genocide, is conceptually unsupportable. One needs to remember that, at least according to one authority [William Schabas], the four groups—racial, ethnic, national, and religious—were chosen because they best represented the constellation of groups that all intersected with the Jewish people who were the subject of the Holocaust. As various scholars and practitioners have tried to defend the definition of genocide first announced in the Genocide Convention, they have generally failed to account for why just these four groups can be the subject of genocide. Disconnecting the exemplary case from the concept of genocide again seems called for. For this and other reasons advanced earlier … the harm of genocide should not be drawn with reference to [or completely constrained by] the Holocaust.” — Larry May, Genocide: A Normative Account (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 79-81
My compilation on genocide is here. And the compilation on international criminal law is here.
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