The term “genocide” is an exact description rather than accusatory.
In the last year, the term “genocide” has become a term of advocacy so as to malign two sides, the Israelis slaughtered by Hamas on Oct. 7th, 2023, even though it was an isolated outrage however much its perpetuators claimed they would do it over and over again, and also by Hamas supporters with regard to the wholesale warfare against Hamas by the Israelis that involved considerable collateral damage. Hamas supporters are not particular about distinguishing between holocaust as a metaphor whereby Israeli warfare is or is just like a holocaust while Israelis invoke the German Holocaust against the Jews as the model and spectre of what has happened and what might happen again. I want to restore the term to its description about a real social event so as to clarify what is going on in the present and to more generally maintain language as mainly an attempt to put in words an accurate account of reality rather than treat words as social transactions that may supplement but hardly crowd out the attempt of language to do the impossible which is to find words to say what social or physical reality is just as words about music are attempts, rather lame in my view, to use story lines or the names of emotions to describe the experience of music or the apparent effect of painting. A redefinition of genocide can be done by broadening the term to include all those incidents of genocide that took place in history as well as the particular incident of Holocaust that applies to what Germany did to the Jews.
The term “genocide” was coined by a lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, to deal with the new phenomenon arising in Europe to describe the slaughter of people for being an ethnic, racial or class group. The term was used to raise high standards for being labelled that activity such as to leave out wars, such as the First World War, and faminnes, such as the Irish Potato famine in the mid nineteenth century. Only that high a bar would lead to world condemnation as beyond humanity and so the nations which engaged in it could condemn it and punish it. Moreover, the definition crafted by a lawyer allowed the party to be blamed, felt in fault, for the activity, because lawyers are in the business of finding blame, criminals guilty or innocent and tort law showing one or another responsible for having created harm. Law, after all, is the business of bringing peace between partiers so that it is possible to get past the moment and continue social life to ordinary life, filled with peace and cooperation rather than holding grudges. This has been the case since the code of the fathers could be penalized with monetary payments to deal with offenses committed when nomadic tribes invaded one another perhaps at night and so assaulted a woman inadvertently but where some compensation could be made. Similarly, American lawyers arrived at compensations for survivors of World Trade Center victims by applying tort law for other injuries. Money compensates for death at least a little bit and the same thing happened when Germany compensated Israel for reparations as both an acknowledgement of the genocide of the Jews and to support the Israeli people in their new state and as well to compensate Jews resettled around the world. That is far different from reparations now invoked for the descendants of black slaves who have since then had a variety of happenstances so that some of them are very successful, some are of mixed race, and some of them were slaveholders, and where no such reparations are offered to other suffering peoples, like the Chinese under the Exclusion Act, or exempted from paying reparations because they were being hunted by Cossacks on the Polish plain when the Africans were brought to America.. So for both reasons, the standard was t6hat genocide referred only to the destruction of a people was intended rather than a circumstance of other purposes, and that indeed applied to the Jews by the German government in the plans made at the Wanasse conference in Berlin in 1942. Or, for that matter, with the collective outrage and murder of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994.
This legal definition of genocide has been wielded by Natasha Hausdorf to show that Issraeli bombing of Saza is legal, an act of war that permits collateral damage, rather than use the term metaphorically by Palestinians to describe what is happening in Gaza. It is like a genocide though Palestinians take the term as literal, so cartried away as they are with their emotions. So many women and children killed requires a description and judgment on that behavior. Something is and has happened in Gaza may be deplorable even if not illegal and the US government warned Netanyahu that it would be regarded as deplorable and leave a stain on Israel if they engaged in large scale bombing of Gaza even if the intention was to get Hamas operatives. Some other term or definition than genocide has to be applied to describe this state of affairs. It is cruel and an atrocity and shameful without being a genocide.
A far more influential definition than the legal one of genocide was supplied by the social philosopher Hannah Arendt whose book in 1950 of “The Origins of Toitalitarianism” shifted the conceptualization of politics from left to right as had neen imagined from the French national assembly to the idea that thee was a folding circle whereby fart right and far right had become identical and created a new form of government and society which were unprecedented just as much as democracy in a large nation was unprecedented before the Americam Revolution. Totalitarian states were different from ordinary authoritarian ones who only persecuted their political opponents. Totalitarian states were engaged in creating new kinds of people for all their people by intimidating them and reeducating them by making for Nazis the new wholesome German or the new Soviet man even if it meant first destabilizing prior personal identities, just what Orwell recognized in “!984” and actually happened at that time when the Secretary of War was renamed the Secretary of Defense.. The totalitarian states, rather than a public relations renaming in the United States, were a threat to all of civilization and not just western civilization because people would lose their wills and become subject to their “Puppet Masters”, which is how Robert Heinlein phrased it. It would be what Horkheimer called “an eclipse of reason”. Indeed, this Arendt formulation was applicable through most of the rest of the century until the frenzy of totalitarianism passed and authoritarianism reemerged in both China and Russia and has held even in Iran which also has theocratic backing.
In the Arendt view, genocide was a necessity for the totalitarian state. They not only had to impugn and eradicate Jews and, for the USSR, the remaining bourgeoisie, and in China as well, through the Cultural Revolution. Theory had to show what the New Man would be like as differing from the Other by adopting the dress and the identity of people now as subservient as those who were now being eliminated. Genocide of the Jews was not just an end in itself; it was a way to understand the new world order as allowing every citizen yo become terrified about their possible fatigue. Now, there were political commentators who disagreed. In “Behemoth”, Franz Neumann presented German life as being rather routine in that the German people were prosperous and well satisfied with their leadership. Germany was still an ordinary country. That lasted until 1943 when Goebbels could still say after Stalingbrad that Germany would now begin total war but that was before massive allied bombing and invasion into their own territory. But the cloud over the world was for half a century the fragmentation of the self, as that was indicated even at home by the frenzy of McCarthyism and the later chant of "Better Dead Than Red”, which were words that were hardly credible if people attended to the meaning of the slogan.
The difficulty of Arendt for thinking that genocide was essential for the totalitarian state is that she looked at the oppresserrs or those in charge as explaining what genocide was about. The victims were only that, a mass because they were the objects of genocide. Arendt put that point with extreme clarity in her “Eichmann in Jerusalem” by portraying this very evil person as a paper pusher, a mere functionary, who made the trains run on time rather than a master Satan, which was invoked by Gideon Hauser, the prosecutor who decried Eichman that way in the trial. Hauser was appealing gto an older sense of evil with Satan as a fallen angel rather than the banal, trite person that Arendt imagined him to be. She was creating a whole new imagery, very compelling even if a bit off and a bit apocalyptic, however understandable under the circumstances that reigned from 1932 to 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
A third interpretation of genocide is offered by historians rather than lawyers and social philosophers. Eli Halevy, the French historian, penned “The Era of Tyrannies” in 1941. The point was that tyrannies emerged a third into the twentieth century because of the strains and disturbances that come about from the transition between an agricultural and an industrial society. People want their traditional ways of life restored and so in desperation turn to extreme nostrums. An even more sophisticated view was offered by Barrington Moore, Jr. in “Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy”, published in 1966, which argued that the upheavals which led to such misery came about because the peasant class had not been abolished before the arrival of industrialism and so lingered on in their resentment, as in Germany and Russia, while England and the United States had turned their peasants into farmers and homesteaders, each on their own farm, and so deeply embedded into economic and social structures that they are not counter-revolutionary. But the trouble is that this explanation is even more removed from the topic of genocide on its own ferms. It treats genocide as a consequence of larger matters rather than itself alone as a phenomenon, of how it works as a social structure. And we will turn to this question now.
A sociological definition of a social phenomenon does not offer blame nor causes and consequences. It looks to some characteristic of the social phenomenon which is present in all examples but is not present in other than the examples to be covered. A table is not defined by its function as a place one can sit at but by there being a platform supported by legs even if a sofa can also serve as a table. Similarly, a democracy is a form of government where more and more of the population are included as voters and can exercise their franchise through fair or impartial election processes and the freedom of speech and assembly and the press so as to engage in elections without intimidation. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is another matter. In Aristotle’s terms, a sociological definition is a formal cause rather than a final cause, though sociological analyses\ such as those provided by Talcott Parsons look at the final cause of a social phenomenon ass the paydirt of the process or structure, as when legal practices are meant to allow conflicts in parties to be placated while the definition has to do with adversarial trials so as to apply statutes to a particular case. There are alternative differences in definition in that an alternative essential of a social phenomenon is treated as its definition as would happen by doing a democracy as a spirit to engage in making and remaking the social contract as Locke imagined happened. But the culture of democracy can be treated as a cause or consequence of institutional democracy or even as applying only to the English speaking peoples rather than available to all of European democracies and those further away such as India and Japan.
A sociological definition of genocide is the following: a genocide takes place when military and other violent forces rather than cultural, economic or social force, are used to manage a group inside a nation to exterminate that group to the extent possible. A national government has choices and people have beliefs and customs that can be used to influence peoples regarded as enemies within. A mild sanction is to dispatch the enemy from their midst and to not allow any to return. That happened with the Jews in England, in which case Jews were regarded with disdain from afar and Christians throughout Europe attributed to Jews to blame for the death of Christ and so for their everlasting shame. That was religious antisemitism. A more active emotion is what we might call social antisemitism, which consists of disdain against stereotypical versions of Jews within the nation, as happened in nineteenth century England and in English society. A further activity for controlling an enemy within is to establish laws which discriminate against Jews, just the sort of laws eased or erased in the early nineteenth century in Europe but reestablished in Germany by the Nuremberg Laws of 1934 which, among other things, forbade miscegenation. The rationale was neither religious or social but through the application of a Social Darwinist ideology of races as in inevitable conflict. An even farther effort to constrain Jews in Germany took place during “kristallnacht” in 1936 when police did not protect Jewish shops from being destroyed by roving mobs. The Final Solution was developed at the Wannsee Conference in 1942. A decision was made to kill off all the Jews even if it meant that trains were used to move these people to work and extermination camps rather than move soldiers and military cargo. A precedent for such behavior is not the pogroms of Eastern Europe which were done in a frenzy and abated but by the imprisonment torture and execution of Morano Jews in Spain on the grounds that they had lapsed back into practicing as Jews even though they had nominally converted to becoming Christians. Other prior exterminations include the slaughter of the Albegensians by Innocent III in the thirteenth centur
A frequ8ent concomitant but not a universal characteristic of genocide is the frenzy which is a social characteristic which sometimes but not always accompanies genocide. A frenzy takes place when there is a disproportionate attention to one feature of a social structure, especially an enemy within, even if allowing the disturbance of other features of the social structure. A good example of a frenzy was McCarthyism in that it saw the dangers of Communism in the late Forties and early Fifties as coming from turncoat Americans rather than the Soviets who hand after all had the A-bomb and a big army and had recently just failed to undermine Western Europe through strikes and coups and had been rescued from that fate by the Marshall Plan. But Whittiker Chambers was in a frenzy, as were his rabid Anti-Communists in thinking that the final war would be between the Communists and the Ex-Communists as if Liberal non-Communists could stomach dealing with the internal enemy. Only the Anti-Communists could prevail because they would not care about legalities or truth or whether times had changed in that loyal Americans in the Thirties might sympathize with Communists because they were pro Black and antifascist.
A left wing frenzy was the #MeToo Movement which posited the slogan of “Always believe the woman” because women would not accuse men for no reason because women were just more moral than men even if it meant putting aside due process so as to convict students of atrocities against women that did not lead to a prison sentence but just shame and an expulsion from colleges. The frenzy abated when women moved on to deal with the danger to their bodies now inflicted on them by the reversal of Roe v. Wade, injuries more palpable than the mismanagement of dating which only sometimes could truly be regarded as rape.
So Germany was in a frenzy about Jews, even if that was a background issue for most Germans and most other countries. The genocide of the Indians in the Wdestern Plains was not accompanied by a frenzy even if Theodore Roosevelt said that “the only good indian is a dead indian” because that was a methodical attempt to end the frontier of the United States to its continental boundaries despite not having conquered Canada and while the rest of the United States was engaged in other business such as industrialization and dealing wit’h immigrants from Europe and temporising about dealing with the resilient Jim Crow practices of the post Civil War South.
A general principle of sociological analysis is that social practices would not continue if they have no social advantage. William Graham Sumner went so far as today that obsolete practices would die out or be eliminated and applied that to slavery in that wages had replaced slavery as the more efficient way of getting manpower and so had become obsolete by the time the Civil War came about. Similarly, war has its purposes. It settles the territorial limits of nations, decides who will be a king and, in the twentieth century, what cultures and kinds of culture will survive. The same is true of genocide. What use, horrible as it may be, does genocide accomplish? Such a discussion is nt part of the definition of genocide but of its intended consequences. What is the final cause of genocide rather than its formal cause?
An easy answer for why Germany engaged in genocide is that by finding an Other to torment and eliminate, Germany unified its people by making them feel secure about all being Germans. That proposition is directly opposed to Hannah Arendt’s view that totalitarian genocide fragments the identities of its own people, fellow Germans as terrified, so Arendt thought as those persecuted. Germans did indeed think it righteous to become a purely Aryan race. But the problem is that it takes a lot of energy, of moral and political capital, to extirpate a segment of its population and that energy could be expended otherwise, such as in developing the economic and scientific advances already available to the German people so that they might command the Continent without a risky war and a sideshow of pursuing an Antisemitic ideology, as did happen in Germany when in the late twentieth century became the powerhouse of Europe after the military failed but the genocide was successful in ending European Jewry.
Another reason for the functionality of genocide is that it is the expression of the cultural longings of a people. Erich Fromm said as much in his book “Escape From Freedom” where he argued that the fatal flaw of German culture was that it traced back to the Luteran insight that a people becomes free by surrendering to the state rather than thinking as was the case in Anglo American thought, that freedom was to become and was free of the state, inviolable in its freedom.. The German principle happened when the various German princes would decide what the religion of their principalities would be followed by their subjects. It also followed from what Luther said in his seminal “The Idea of Being a Christian” which said that the only decision a Christian had to make was to decide to become a Christian and surrender his life to that. But that is to neglect the fact that Protestants, to the contrary, are active people, not just pietists, ever engaging in new economic and cultural ventures, as that is elaborated by Max Weber. As is often the case, what seems like a clear cut religious imbrication is sufficiently hedged and watered down as when “Thou shalt not kill” does not require pacifism.
Another though not unraveled feature of genocide is what we might call suicide by self-genocide, which parallels the phenomenon of suicide by cop when a demented person gets himself killed by threatening and shooting at police forces. They get an end they desire quickly. Suicide by self-genocide did not happen in Germany because it meant to win the war as well as accomplish its genocide. Hamas, on the other hand, does seem to be willing to complete suicide through genocide by declaring its intentions to kill all Jews in Israel rather than negotiate a poltical peace, however distasteful, so as to become economically and culturally successful and await long time forces to develop Palestinian dominance over Israel but expect and welcome military retribution for the little bit of suffering they can impose on Israelis. It is a principled but hard policy equivalent to the Jews in Masada who defended themselves to the last man and the Japanese who wanted to resist the invasion of their own homeland regardless of cost. Churchill, remember, still had an army and a navy and a largely united people and the tacit and active support by the United States and the Commonwealth to resist Germany when he decided not to negotiate with Hitler. His extension of the war was not suicide by self-genocide.