Democracy and genocide.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Nairn, Tom
• Date: 01 January 2001

Genocide has become another spectre of our times. It is repeatedly voiced in novels, films and 'harrowing' journalistic or TV accounts, and is now calling forth distinguished academic studies like Michael Mann's The Dark Side of Democracy. (1) Events from Tibet and East Timor to Kosovo and Macedonia constantly feed the tendency, which is almost invariably underpinned by a deeply gloomy vision of human nature. 'Is this what we are really like?' The ray-of-hope people then tend to clutch at is the thought that this is what we would be like, were we not at least part of the time prevented from being ourselves by reason, religion or at least reluctant calculation of the probable costs of 'being ourselves'. Another very typical example comes from the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in his recent article 'On the Nature of Genocide' in Le Monde Diplomatique. (2) His subtitle, 'A Century of Barbarism', indicates a line of argument that follows Hannah Arendt, Walter Laqueur, and Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust. (3) In Kapuscinski's terms, 'Contemporary civilization has as part of its essence and dynamic certain features capable ... of producing acts of genocide'. Far from receding in importance, these may be on the increase. Rwanda, Bosnia and East Timor have all occurred in the 1990s, and yet reproduced many traits of, for example, the Nazi Judeocide and the massacre of the Armenians earlier in the century.

Kapuscinski gives a left-Catholic version of this dismal story. He believes that 'the eclipse of religious conscience, and the atrophy of feelings and of the distinction between good and evil' have contributed to so many disasters. 'Love thy neighbour' has lost its conviction, he argues, and opened the door to more deeply embedded traits of human nature--a distrust of the Other and of the Unknown easily exploitable by 'contemporary ideologies of hatred, like nationalism, fascism, Stalinism, racism ...' The only answer lies in 'raising the moral level of both individuals and societies--a more lively spiritual awareness and a greater will to do good, and 'treat thy neighbour as thyself'. Shortly before this interpretation there appeared another, by Quebecois-British theorist Michael Ignatieff. (4) His left-Protestant view of the subject is if anything gloomier than Kapuscinski's. He claims that inherited moral principles have a 'tribal' origin that puts difference above the common features of the species. Thus 'moral universalism is a late and vulnerable addition to the moral vocabulary of mankind', and is always liable to collapse under pressure. Human nature craves above all homogeneity and a 'world without enemies'. In situations of breakdown it will usually be this desire that (suitably orchestrated) appears to offer salvation. We will only be ourselves once they are out of the way--once and for all.

Ignatieff goes on to give a very interesting account of the origins of the term 'genocide'. In fact he provides a potted biography of the man who coined it, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. The term dates from 1943, and was founded upon the latter's book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, a juridical analysis of what the Nazis were doing in the territories of the New Order. Lemkin realized that 'Aryanism' was in fact a project to permanently divide the human species, a goal which involved 'inverting the equality provisions of all the European legal traditions' and--where necessary--'putting down' all those who either would or could not conform. Once that division was achieved, eugenic control would cause the elite or super-species and the assorted sub-species to develop separately, and cease to contend over rights and spoils. Democracy would be dead. This was the true 'final solution', for which the Jews and Rom of Europe were being used as guinea-pigs. In its awesome context 'genocide' was a rational way of putting peoples on one side or the other: up with the lords of humankind or down among the long-term losers (whose complete disappearance would, in the famous phrase, represent 'no great mischief'). (5)

Lemkin's solution was to reinforce the ideal oneness of homo sapiens by providing a firmer legal foundation for it. Jurisprudence had to take over from religious or moral aspiration. That idea underlay the Nuremberg trials and the constitution of the United Nations. 'Late and vulnerable' it may be, but it has persisted through one disaster after another, and seems likely to be enhanced under the conditions of post-1989 globalization. One fruit of this strange era of transition is the recurrent liberal idea that 'we'--the world community, or would-be community--have already assumed a kind of putative responsibility for things like post-Yugoslav 'ethnic cleansing' or the Rwandan massacre of 1994. This is the theme, for example, of Linda Melvern's A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide. (6) In such accounts the world is often contracted to mean 'we in the West'. This elision implies that the Atlantic area (or even NATO) still pursues the 1945 victory by (so to speak) standing in for a non-existent world authority. Hence it can be judged culpable whenever outside intervention fails to forestall or arrest atrocities. In a world still stubbornly divided--maybe more so than during the Cold War--raising the moral decibels...