“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.     

Church,State and the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract

This article takes a critical look at the experience of the Christian Churches during the time of the Rwandan genocide between 6 April and mid July 1994. It is established that in about 100 days about one million people faced death at the hands of soldiers, militias and ordinary civilians. Most victims were killed in churches and other church premises where they had gathered in hope of protection. The genocide in Rwanda was extensive both in its scale and execution. In this article we attempt to understand why and how the churches were involved in the killings, and the implications of such involvement in contemporary efforts towards reconciliation.     

Presentation is Everything: Foodways, Tablewares, and Colonial Identity at Presidio Los Adaes

Ceramics and zooarchaeological remains are commonly used as indicators of status and wealth at colonial-period sites, yet colonial expectations with regard to cuisine were often difficult to meet within the rigors of frontier life. In this paper, we juxtapose faunal and ceramic assemblages from Presidio Los Adaes and, informed by ethnohistorical and visual data, investigate how social expectations with regard to foodways were negotiated on the Spanish colonial frontier. While ceramic evidence suggests that tableware varied among households, the zooarchaeological assemblage indicates that Los Adaes residents shared the same basic diet.     

Everything is at a time and in a place

The customary absence of anthropological perspectives in reports and policy recommendations on climate change and diversity loss is again confirmed in the current IPCC report and the recent UN report on biodiversity. This is a severe shortcoming since there is widespread agreement that goals are rarely met in these domains. Anthropology can offer a holistic perspective and local solutions which would make a difference. Policymakers are attracted to figures and universal recipes, but they need prose and diversity.     

The Modern State,the Question of Genocide,and Holocaust Scholarship

This review article asks: what defines mass violence in the twentieth century as particularly modern and how does the Holocaust figure in this history? The article compares the work of two path-breaking historians—Mark Levene and Timothy Snyder—while also discussing recent research by other scholars. It argues that the emergence of nation-states, together with technology and scientific knowledge to alter the environment, created the conditions for distinctly modern violence aiming to destroy diversity in societies and the environment. The article examines the relation between genocide, including the Holocaust, and the rise of twentieth-century nation-states. It follows the persistent idea that the Holocaust is unique in a way that establishes a hierarchy of Holocaust/genocide/other mass violence. As Levene argues, the contextualization of the complex set of events and processes called the Holocaust within the violent history of ethno-national and ethno-religious “homogenization” of nation-states challenges this framework. The article then turns to Snyder’s argument that, since Hitler’s worldview of racial struggle over land and food rejected agricultural science, genetic engineering in agriculture is one way to heed the Holocaust’s warning. A discussion of the devastating impact of genetic engineering in agriculture—in the frame of the violent implications of modern “development”—underscores how the destruction of societies perceived as “backward,” particularly indigenous groups in the Global South, follows the destruction of their biodiverse habitats and agriculture to make way for monoculture genetically engineered crops. A focus on case studies of such mass violence and the responses by indigenous groups facilitates, finally, a discussion of the recent turn to microhistories in Holocaust scholarship. These offer another contextualized view: of the societies that faced the assault of nation-states. The article concludes that the complexities on the social level, each rooted in specific circumstances and histories, challenge the analytical value of the general term “Holocaust.”     

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.     

Everything Old Is New Again: Recent Approaches to Research on the Archaic Period in the Western United States

There are regional differences in how archaeologists conduct their research on the Archaic period. The rich array of techniques and approaches used to examine this period in the West include human behavioral ecology and other evolutionary perspectives, technological style and aspects of practice theory, neuropsychological theory, and more. Recent research in the Great Basin, Southwest, Great Plains, Columbia-Fraser Plateau, and coastal California is surveyed to highlight commonalities and differences in the questions asked of the archaeological data and in the techniques that are used.     

Act and idea in the Nazi Genocide

The opening reference to masturbation in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) provides evidence of not only an embedded cultural commentary on the masturbatory tendencies of modernity but also specific contempt for the novel as a masturbatory literary form. The same point is made elsewhere in Swift’s poetry and his parody of the erotic scene of female masturbation that continued to be a staple of amatory fiction. Yet the same body of writing reveals Swift’s recognition that he too was guilty of producing literary fuel for masturbation, as were the Ancients themselves whose works continued to invite a sexualized response from readers. As such, Swift reveals an ironic point of agreement with female authors of amatory fiction such as Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, who represent instances of the poetry of the Ancients being put precisely to this use, providing tacit excuse for their own erotically charged writing. In his later notorious diagnosis of Swift as a chronic masturbator literary physician Thomas Beddoes is arguably responding at least in part to Swift’s own sense of entrapment within masturbatory modernity.