“Genocide is Fascism in Action”: Aron Trainin and Soviet Portrayals of Genocide

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Soviet legal scholar Aron Trainin’s evolving writings on international law. Initially, Trainin formulated aspects of his concept of “crimes against peace” as a sort of Soviet alternative to Raphael Lemkin’s crimes of barbarity and vandalism. Crimes against peace both converged with the larger international movement to outlaw aggressive war, provided a Soviet alternative to proposed international crimes that they believed would threaten Soviet sovereignty, and provided a Soviet response to Lemkin’s proposals to outlaw mass killings. During World War II, Trainin articulated the Nazi extermination of the Jews as “crimes against peaceful civilians,” linking the Nazi atrocities to his concept of crimes against peace. Trainin’s concept of “crimes against peaceful civilians” encompassed the atrocities of the Holocaust while also asserting that the Soviet experience of the war – most notably Soviet sacrifice and suffering – meant that the Soviets should determine how international criminal law punished the war’s perpetrators. After World War II, when it became clear that genocide, rather than “crimes against peace” or “crimes against peaceful civilians,” was becoming the primary concept in international law to understand mass killings, Trainin portrayed the concept of genocide according to the perspective of Soviet propaganda, opposing an international criminal court for genocide, supporting the concept of cultural genocide, and portraying genocide as an inevitable outcome of capitalism. At the same time, Trainin and the Soviets never abandoned his concept of “crimes against peace,” portraying capitalism as inherently bound up with war and genocide. Trainin was the most significant genocide scholar in the Soviet Union, and his work exemplifies both the ways in which Soviet approaches to international law converged with other approaches, and the ways in which the Soviet Union diverged from non-Soviet international law.     

‘Ours is a war of survival’: Biafra,Nigeria and arguments about genocide, 1966–70

Arguments about genocide played a central role in how the government of Biafra and its supporters framed Biafran assertions of independence. Claims that genocide was occurring first cited violence directed against Igbos in northern Nigeria during 1966, before expanding to include both Nigerian military action against civilian targets in Biafra and the use of starvation as a weapon of war. Belief in Nigeria's genocidal intentions became a central tenet of emergent Biafran nationalism, and drew on both distorted representations of Nigeria and on historical analogies with the Nazi genocide against Jews. While the determination by a team of international observers that genocide was not occurring eroded the persuasiveness of Biafran genocide claims abroad, it did little to undercut Biafrans' belief that they were marked for extermination.     

Re‐evaluating otherness in genocidal ideology

Ideas of otherness in both nationalism and genocide studies do not sufficiently explain genocidal levels of policy and ideological development, nor do they help identify groups that may be selected in the future for this particular kind of destruction. This article sets out to introduce the typology of ‘anti‐nation’ to the dialogue of nationalism studies in order to more aptly identify prospective groups at risk of future possible genocidal aggression. This article looks to the Armenian genocide to provide analysis for a greater understanding of the way radicalising ideology evolves regarding the anti‐nation during the early years of identity development in states radicalising towards genocide.     

Genocide and Global Queer Politics

This article presents a critical analysis of the relationship between the concept of genocide and global queer politics, offering an original mapping and examination of the discourse of genocide in this respect. Starting from the beginnings of genocide discourse with Lemkin and the United Nations Genocide Convention, existing literature is analysed to reveal circumscribed usage in relation to non-heterosexual lives. The methodology combines analysis of genocide discourse with case studies. The article maps and analyses the historically shifting form of genocide discourse, including through attention to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and demonstrates how the patriarchal and heteronormative origins of this discourse continue to have effects that exclude queer people. This analysis is developed, in particular, in relation to the absence of sexuality, gender, sexual orientation or gender identity as group categories in the Genocide Convention. Interwoven with this analysis of discourse, case study analysis is used in relation to Nazi Germany, Uganda and the Gambia to establish genocidal processes focused on homosexuality in each. The scope of claims for anti-homosexual acts of genocide is thus extended in Nazi Germany and Uganda, and such a claim is initiated in the Gambia, while appreciating the complex relation of “homosexuality” to African sexual identities. It is also argued that new definitions of groups from the Rwanda tribunal represent openings for some kinds of queer politics. The concluding section then draws on the discourse analyses of Foucault and postcolonial studies to initiate discussion of the potential discursive effects of invoking genocide in relation to homosexuality or queer politics, in particular contexts. It is argued that a greater consciousness of genocide in queer analysis and politics would be desirable, even while the existing terms of genocide discourse must be contested.     

Military Anxiety and Genocide: Explaining Campaigns of Annihilation (and Their Absence)

When and why do states launch campaigns of genocide against minorities? In 2017, in a violent campaign increasingly described as genocide, the Myanmar military drove almost 700,000 Rohingya from Rakhine State into Bangladesh killing an estimated 6,700 in the first month and an unknown number overall. This assault is particularly puzzling given the international goodwill and economic benefits the regime was accruing since it opened its political system after decades of isolation. Scholars have identified a number of causes of genocide yet this literature requires development in two areas. First, few studies compare cases of genocide with situations of lower level political violence, meaning it is difficult to distinguish between societies that are simply violent from those which are genocidal. Second, despite the central role played by militaries in genocide, most studies have treated the institution as simply a tool of nationalists and other genocidal leaders rather than as actors with their own incentives and fears. In this study, I develop an explanation of genocide that places militaries at its centre. I contend that armed forces sometimes choose genocide during periods of rapid political change when they perceive a serious threat to their political and economic interests or self-appointed status as “guardian of the nation.” My study begins with a comparison between Rakhine State, Myanmar and a similarly volatile region that has avoided genocide, Assam in Northeast India. In a later stage of theory testing I examine another case of genocide, Indonesia in 1965/66.     

“Situated Bystandership” During and After the Rwandan Genocide

The dominant account of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath focuses on victims and perpetrators, and rescapés and génocidaires. Less is known about bystanders, mainly Hutu non-perpetrators, who are held collectively responsible for having witnessed violence without trying to stop the killers or help the victims. This article challenges the homogenous portrayal of the unresponsive bystander group, and introduces the novel concept of “situated bystandership” to draw attention to the proximal and representational contexts that shape bystanders’ responses, roles and positions in society. First, to be a “situated bystander” means to resist the pressure to participate in genocidal violence and to belong to a moral order that is distinct from that of the extremists: the moral world of the ordinary, good-hearted people. Second, Rwandans who are “neither pursuing nor being pursued” occupy multiple roles at different points in time. Many are bystanders to specific episodes of violence and their “acts of non-intervention” shape the course of history. Given the pressure to participate in the genocide, the inaction of bystanders could be considered as passive resistance to the ideology of mass killing. Therefore, in a continuum between victims and perpetrators, bystanders might be positioned closer to the victims than the perpetrators. Third, gacaca is a process through which not only is culpability ascertained but individual innocence is also established. This reconfiguration makes it possible to shift the homogenized perception of Hutu non-perpetrators from the position of the morally guilty bystander group towards that of the individual innocent bystander. In contrast to the tendency to essentialize accounts of violence, homogenize groups and reframe controversial stories to fit political strategies, there is value in standing back and identifying the contexts that shape bystanders’ roles, responses and representations. “Situated bystandership” is a lens through which this objective can be achieved.     

‘The miserable remnant of this ill-used people’: colonial genocide and the Moriori of New Zealand's Chatham Islands

Genocide scholars have not engaged with the killing of the Moriori people of New Zealand's Chatham Islands by two Māori iwi (tribes). New Zealand historians who have discussed Moriori have not used the paradigms and language of genocide studies. This article argues that Moriori were victims of genocide, and that their experience both challenges and deepens how colonial genocide is understood. Narratives of colonial genocides that assume the destruction of an indigenous people by a colonizing power are inadequate for understanding events on the Chathams, as are genocidal frameworks that assume perpetrators must be state actors. The colonial role was important but indirect: the encounter of Māori with Britain and Australia provided the physical and ideological tools that made the Moriori genocide possible. Māori behaviour on the Chathams diverged from tradition, with the racial tropes, destructive behaviours and justification for invading the Chathams all acquired through the colonial spread of British people into Polynesia. More recently, the use of imported imagery and politicization of the Moriori experience has revealed the consequences of successive generations’ failure to properly remember or even identify the genocide.     

‘Just and lawful war’ as genocidal war in the (United States) Northwest Ordinance and Northwest Territory, 1787–1832

This article focuses on the United States Northwest Ordinance of 1787's profession of ‘utmost good faith’ towards Indians and its provision for ‘just and lawful wars’ against them. As interpreted by US officials as they authorized and practised war against native communities in the Northwest Territory from 1787 to 1832, the ‘just and lawful wars’ clause legalized wars of ‘extirpation’ or ‘extermination’, terms synonymous with genocide by most definitions, against native people who resisted US demands that they cede their lands. Although US military operations seldom achieved extirpation, this was due to their ineptness and the success of indigenous strategies rather than an absence of intention. When US military forces did succeed in achieving their objective, the result was massacre, as revealed in the Black Hawk War of 1832. US policy did not call for genocide in the first instance, preferring that Indians embrace the gift of civilization in exchange for their lands. Should Indians reject this display of ‘utmost good faith’, however, US policy legalized genocidal war against them.     

Settler colonialism in Canada and the Métis

Although the literature on settler colonialism intends to identify what is specific about the settler colonial experience, it can also homogenize diverse settler colonial narratives and contexts. In particular, in Canada, discussion of the ‘logic of elimination’ must contend with the discrete experiences of multiple Indigenous groups, including the Métis. This article examines relationships between Métis people and settler colonialism in Canada to distinguish how Métis histories contribute to a broader narrative of settler colonial genocide in Canada. Cast as ‘halfbreeds’ and considered rebels by the newly forming Canadian nation-state, Métis peoples were discouraged from ‘illegitimate breeding’. Moreover, their unique experiences of the residential school system and forced sterilization have heretofore been underexplored in historiographies of genocide and settler colonial elimination in Canada. These social, political and racial divisions in Canada are magnified through genocidal structures and they reach a critical juncture between colonialism and mixed ethnicities. At that juncture, groups like the Métis in Canada are within a metaphorical gap or, more accurately, a jurisdictional gap. Colonial treatment of the Métis demonstrates, in part, the broad reach of colonial control and how uneven it is, often to the detriment of the Métis and Indigenous groups in Canada.     

Marketing genocide: Biafran propaganda strategies during the Nigerian civil war, 1967–70

Biafran propaganda played a pivotal role in the political and diplomatic conduct of the Nigerian civil war. Their propaganda campaign portrayed the war as the only possible response to a genocidal campaign against them. Despite the fact that Biafra's message remained largely focused on the genocide theme, Biafran propaganda was remarkably agile in its ability to adapt to the war's changing circumstances. Biafra's propaganda was designed to create a coherent message and intended to elicit sympathy from world public opinion and to instil a survival ethos in its population at home despite very limited communication resources. It is precisely this relationship between the aims of Biafran propaganda and the Biafrans' resourcefulness that allowed that message to be so effective, both during the war and in the collective memory of Igbo political nationalism. This article analyses Biafran print and radio propaganda as well as internal Biafran documents about the production, evaluation and monitoring of the movement's propaganda campaign to show how the secessionist message was constructed, delivered, refined and adapted.     

Geographic aspects of genocide: a comparison of Bosnia and Rwanda

The study of genocide requires a geographic approach that looks at how genocidal actions are purposefully planned to target specific groups and areas, methodically implemented through expulsions and murder, and politically intertwined with popular aspirations of territorial nationalism. A geographic focus is used here to discuss the concept of genocide, its recurrence in the twentieth century, its formulation under international law, and its eruption in Bosnia and Rwanda. In this comparative approach, geography-linked concepts such as Lebensraum , territorial nationalism, forced migration, and ethnic cleansing are used to explain the production of genocide and its consequences.     

On the Side of Light: Performing Morality at Rwanda’s Genocide Memorials

Abstract

In Rwanda, numerous memorials have arisen to remember the 1994 genocide and its victims. This paper considers the effect of the national genocide memorials on Western tourist visitors, in the context of research on ‘dark tourism’ and Western attitudes toward death and the dead. It draws on the idea that, in a Western context, viewing the remains of violent death can be a kind of ‘soft murder’, and on the concept that the act of witnessing violence creates a community of witnesses implicated in that violence. Western visitors to Rwandan genocide memorials therefore form a community, and their responses are guided by a set of community rules regarding behaviour and experiences during and after the visit. These rules, this paper argues, are rooted in pressures to assert oneself as a properly moral individual through performing morality in a morally ambiguous setting.     

‘I Could Eat My Baby to Bits’; passion and desire in lesbian mother–children love

Mother–children love and adult–sexual love tend to be differentiated by the absence/presence of passion and desire. In the course of my research on lesbian parent families, the artificiality of this distinction has become transparent. In attempting to describe ‘mother love’ mothers said repeatedly they loved their children ‘to bits’, wanting to ‘eat them up’, feeling ‘utterly passionate’ towards them. This challenges the traditional sexual–sexless boundaries between parents and children. The intensity of ‘maternal love’ often means that mother–child intimacy becomes a site of delicate negotiations between desire and love. The legal–moral boundaries that are invoked prohibit intergenerational desire, upholding the incest taboos that dominate Western culture. However the construction of these boundaries neither stop adult–child ‘border skirmishes’ nor quash children's ‘natural’ exploration of their sexuality. I explore how bodies and bodily boundaries are used to manage sexuality and desire in families. I consider how mothers negotiate their way through the contradictions of mother–children love, incorporating the passion and desire of this love. I suggest mothers' acknowledgment of their passion does not mean that ‘maternal love’ is potentially sexual/incestuous, but instead questions its conceptual framing. I suggest that future research on mother–children love might usefully look outside the traditional discourses used to describe and delineate love, towards ones that incorporate non‐sexual desire.     

Australia: a continuing genocide?

Debates about genocide in Australia have for the most part focussed on past frontier killings and child removal practices. This article, however, focuses on contemporary culturally destructive policies, and the colonial structures that produce them, through the analytical lens of the concept of genocide. The article begins with a discussion of the meaning of cultural genocide, locating the idea firmly in Lemkin's work before moving on to engage with the debates around Lemkin's distinction between genocide and cultural 'diffusion.' In contrast to those scholars who prefer the word 'ethnocide,' the underlying conceptual contention is that the term 'cultural genocide' simply describes a key method of genocide and should be viewed, without the need for qualification, as genocide. While direct physical killing and genocidal child removal practices may have ceased in Australia, some indigenous activists persuasively contend that genocide is a continuing process in an Australia that has failed to decolonise. Concurring with these views the article argues that the contemporary expression of continuing genocidal relations in Australia can be seen principally, and perversely, in the colonial state's official reconciliation process, native title land rights regime and the recent interventionist 'solutions' to indigenous 'problems' in the Northern Territory.     

Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and Settler‐Colonial State Formation

This paper examines the use of the concept of cultural genocide to understand one particular episode in Australian legal, political and social history, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, mostly during the 20th century. After outlining the approach of Australian courts to the idea of cultural genocide, the paper examines the construction of the UN Genocide Convention, particularly the clause concerning the forcible removal of children, which illustrates the underlying instability of the boundary between a cultural and a physical understanding of genocide. It then explores how this instability was manifested in the development of early 20th century Australian legislation concerning the ‘protection’ of Aborigines, indicating the underlying racially‐oriented coerciveness of conceptions of Aboriginal ‘welfare’, and concludes by reflecting on the wide range of ways in which the concept of genocide can and should be used, especially in capturing the experience of Indigenous peoples under settler‐colonialism.     

The great divide? Notions of racism in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: new answers to an old problem

ABSTRACT

One of Michele Sarfatti’s greatest accomplishments has been to challenge the notion that there was a fundamental difference between the biological racism predominant in Nazi Germany and the ‘cultural racism’ of Fascist Italy. I examine how this dichotomy took shape and the meaning it acquired over time. My basic argument is that this division is the result of dialogue between Italian and German population experts during the interwar period, and that making a sharp distinction between a ‘German’ and an ‘Italian’ style of racism helped them to construct their own identities. In other words, the debate on racism was a vehicle for defining what it meant to be a ‘true’ Nazi or Fascist. In this way, differences in racist ideology can be understood as a product of struggles over meaning. Ultimately, my aim is to de-essentialize the meaning of race in research on both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.     

Racialising global relations: the Rwandan genocide and the ethics of representation

At a time when the historical experience of the Rwandan genocide continues to be invoked to imagine and affirm international responsibility for the suffering of others, this article examines one way in which this event has been made to mean. Through a critical reading of Hotel Rwanda (a feature film) and Shake Hands with the Devil (a memoir), the article examines how the Rwandan genocide has been framed as an event of ‘white’ Western racism towards ‘black’ African injury. Without disputing the veracity of this explanatory framework, this article interrogates its representational politics and ethics. I problematise its continued use of inherently discriminatory racial categories, demonstrate its Eurocentric nature and call for a mode of understanding the ethical significance of the Rwandan genocide that is not limited to an already existing global relation between suffering ‘black’ bodies and potential ‘white’ saviours. In critiquing these texts and this discursive framework, my aim is to enable ways of coming to terms with the genocide that can accommodate the complex connections that do and may exist between non-Rwandans and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.     

The Wannsee Conference in 1942 and the National Socialist living space dystopia

The Wannsee Conference is still largely understood as the ‘echo’ of an earlier decision to annihilate European Jewry. This article questions this assumption on three grounds. First, it does not fully acknowledge that it did not call for a systematic and immediate mass murder of all Jews. Secondly, it mistakenly concludes that because the conference targeted only Jews, it also emerged from within the narrower confines of the regime's anti-Jewish policies. Thirdly, and as a consequence, this assumption represents a retrospective reading of the conference that straightens the ‘twists’ that even at this late point in time still characterized the ‘road to Auschwitz’. This article offers a different interpretation. Situating the Wannsee Conference in the broader context of Nazi Germanization policies, the article will show how Heydrich's actions at Wannsee can be better understood as a response to early failures in Germanizing annexed Poland and the settlement fantasies coming out of the SS apparatus after the invasion of the Soviet Union. While the Wannsee Conference undoubtedly was an attempt by the SS to consolidate its control over anti-Jewish policies, it was also a way for Heydrich to reclaim lost influence in the broader field of Nazi population policies by aligning the treatment of ‘enemy populations’ with the grander vision of a ‘German East’. This Nazi dystopia not only called for destroying Jewish existence in Europe, but demanded that even the way in which Jews were killed would serve the Nazi cause. For this reason, this article argues for understanding the minutes of the meeting literally. Having learned the lessons from previous failures, while at the same time under pressure to support the megalomaniacal settlement plans, Heydrich actually meant what he said when he dictated the protocol condemning Jews not to their immediate death but to annihilation through labour.     

Fearing social and cultural death: genocide and elimination in settler colonial Canada—an Indigenous perspective

This article reviews recent works on Indigenous politics and history in the Canadian context to produce insights about genocide in the Canadian context. The article is situated primarily in the field of Indigenous studies while also drawing on the field of settler colonial studies. It begins with contemplation of the concept of genocide and related terms in the Canadian context. The author suggests that it is useful to apply the concept of elimination developed by Patrick Wolfe to studies of genocide. The article then turns to Mohawk Interruptus with significant emphasis placed on how author Audra Simpson theorizes the concept of ‘refusal’ and the ‘fear of social and political death’. The last part of the article focuses on two books that examine the late nineteenth-century northern plains: Metis and the Medicine Line by Michel Hogue and Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk. These books succeed in detailing the great changes that occurred as the fur trade era fell away and a settler colonial regime emerged on the Canadian plains. For Indigenous peoples, these changes had, and continue to have, devastating consequences. Drawing heavily on the insights of Simpson, the second half of the article argues that studying the late nineteenth-century northern plains produces important methodological insights about the study of genocide in Canada.     

Armed and unarmed: struggles without weapons in Europe and in Italy

Abstract

The starting point for this article is the concept of civil resistance formulated by the French historian Jacques Semelin to describe the forms of unarmed and often non-violent resistance adopted during the Nazi occupations. These included strikes, protests against high food prices, refusal to join Nazi professional associations, the moral isolation of the enemy, actions to rescue Jews, the organisation of clandestine schools (in Poland) as well as support for armed struggle. While historians have looked on these struggles merely as secondary to or supportive of armed restsitance, the concept of civil resistance shows instead how they were autonomous social responses to Nazi dominion. After showing how since the 1990s there has been much closer dialogue between these two apparoaches, the article examines the ways in which the forms of civil resistance in Italy differed from countries such as Denmark, with greater emphasis on private actions and indivdual intiatives and informal networks in which women were always especiallly active and influential. In Italy, civil resistance seems to have been less ‘political’ and more ‘female’ than in northern Europe. The article concludes by examining the realtionship between the struggles in which women were involved and the concept of civil resistance, which although extremely important is only one step towards a fuller evaluation of the role of women in civil resistance.