OTHER VOICES: IT IS A MORAL IMPERATIVE FOR THE WORLD TO HALT GENOCIDES
Henry Brysk

MLive.com
arbor/index.ssf/2009/04/other_voices_it_is_a_moral _imp.html
April 7 2009
Michigan

After the Nuremberg trials exposed the enormity of the Holocaust, the
cry arose, "Never again!" In a United Nations convention, genocide was
declared an international crime and defined as encompassing a broad
range of atrocities of which the Holocaust was the ultimate example.

Since then, there have been many outbreaks of genocide, some with
millions of victims. As with the Nazi Holocaust, the world paid
no attention until the killing was well under way. In Rwanda,
a holocaust was achieved in a remarkably short time without
German technological efficiency. The U.N. never took effective
action to stop a genocide. Instead, it elected the Sudanese regime,
responsible for the highest genocidal death toll, to its Human Rights
Commission. Where a genocide was interrupted, that was due to either
ultimately successful military reaction by the targeted group or
to invasion from a neighbor; the only significant intervention from
farther away came from NATO after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

It is particularly disturbing that many genocides (including the
bloodiest) never penetrated the global consciousness. How did all
the good intentions fail?

Part of the problem is the interaction of a well-meaning,
all-encompassing definition with lack of an enforcement policy and
with weakness of will. The Nazi Holocaust was the ultimate genocide,
aimed at the "final solution" of killing all Jews, with emphasis
on children so that there would be no future generations. The
U.N. convention specifies "with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part." The term "ethnic cleansing" attained currency during the
breakup of Yugoslavia to describe the systematic harassment of an
ethnic group into leaving a particular territory.

It is in the nature of such violence, if unimpeded, to escalate into
episodes of mass murder and rape, as in Bosnia and Darfur. The Nazis
started with ethnic cleansing of Jews out of Germany and went step
by step all the way. The campaign by the Chinese to eliminate Tibetan
identity by mass immigration has been dubbed cultural genocide. There
is considerable disparity among the cases, and the required response
is graduated; this has been an excuse for endless debate instead of
action. Conversely, not all mass murder is genocide; there was no
ethnic distinction between perpetrators and victims in Cambodia.

Holocaust denial is fading (except in some parts of the Middle
East). It has never had any credibility, in view of the enormous
physical evidence (witnesses, mass graves, crematoria), reinforced by
the German bureaucratic compulsiveness about record-keeping. (Such
denial can be persistent; nearly a century later, the Turks refuse
to admit to the Armenian genocide.) It is a mistake to lump the
deniers with believers in alien abductions. They are either neo-Nazis
seeking paranoid recruits or Arab terrorists who aspire to repeat
the Holocaust.

The more sophisticated successor to Holocaust denial is trivialization,
calling any alleged mistreatment a Holocaust (or genocide). This
passes as rhetorical excess, but it is more insidious: The constant
misuse of the term desensitizes the listener, often the deliberate
intent. It can thus serve to disarm the resolve to react to the real
atrocities committed by the complainant.

A related syndrome is "moral equivalency," the doctrine that the
purity of the victim must be examined before one deigns to intervene
(e.g. discourse about the socioeconomic interaction between farmers
and nomads as a root cause in Darfur). Although the tone of Holocaust
trivialization is raucous while moral equivalency is expressed
sanctimoniously, both lead to ethical failure. They both provide
rationalizations for avoiding action.

A more recent phenomenon has been the emergence of fanatics with
genocidal ambitions beyond their present capabilities who commit
episodic indiscriminate murders. The limited scope of each individual
atrocity has led the clueless to call for "proportionate response." A
week after 9/11, a full-page ad in The Ann Arbor News opposed military
action in Afghanistan. Hair splitters have found it acceptable to bomb
the caves of al-Qaida but not the tunnels of Hamas. Smallish mass
murders (suicide bombing of weddings and funerals, rockets fired at
kindergartens) are deemed to entitle the victims only to retaliate on
the same scale (how?). In other words, the terrorists are led to expect
that the punishment will be at a level that is acceptable to them,
so they can keep on killing. Incidentally, genocide in installments
is still genocide.

The massacres were not halted in time in the Nazi Holocaust and in
the succeeding genocides. There is a crucial need for moral clarity:
Genocidal mass murder is the ultimate crime against humanity and
its perpetrators are evil. It is a moral imperative to stop them and
to bring them to justice, and this can only be accomplished by the
prompt exertion of sufficient force.

I should be my brother’s keeper. Powers that are militarily capable of
stopping the killing and fall short are guilty of passive complicity
(or worse); ineffective gestures (U.N. resolutions, economic sanctions,
"dialogue") amount to a hypocritical failure of will. The sophistry
of moral equivalency is verbal fiddling while Darfur burns.

Mass murder is simply never an acceptable form of conflict
resolution. Laundering its perpetrators as "militants" is an abdication
of journalistic ethics. The alleged grievances of the killers and the
sins of their targets have no bearing on the need to act promptly;
you may choose to study these matters at leisure, but only after the
bloodshed has been halted. Psychoanalysis takes years; murder does not.

Henry Brysk is retired in Ann Arbor since 2001 (two previous periods
of living and working here add up to a decade). A Holocaust survivor,
he has long pondered why the world repeatedly fails to deter genocides.