A. Dirk Moses

Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas

That Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) was keenly interested in colonial genocides is virtually unknown. Most commonly, and erroneously, he is understood as coining the term genocide in the wake of the Holocaust of European Jewry in order to reflect its features as a state-organized and ideologically-driven program of mass murder. An inspection of his unpublished writings in New York and Cincinnati reveals that this is a gross distortion of his thinking. In fact, the intellectual breakthrough that led to the concept of genocide occurred well before the Holocaust. Already in the 1920s and early 1930s, he had begun formulating the concepts and laws that would culminate in his founding text, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), and in the United Nations convention on genocide four years later. It is a signal failure of genocide studies scholars in North America in particular, where the field has been primarily based until recently, that they have neglected his manuscripts sitting on their doorstep, preferring to regard themselves as fellow “pioneers of genocide studies,” although there is surely one pioneer, namely, Raphael Lemkin. Rather than investigate what he actually meant by the term and its place in world history, the field has rejected or misunderstood his complex definition and engaged instead in comparative study of twentieth century mass killing and totalitarianism, all the while claiming Lemkin as a legitimating authority. Contrary to the weight of this scholarship, what Lemkin’s manuscripts reveal is that early modern and modern colonialism was central to his conception of genocide. Indeed, the very notion is colonial in nature because it entails occupation and settlement. The link is made plain by Lemkin in his description of genocide on the first page of the salient chapter of Axis Rule:

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights: the ‘uniqueness of the Holocaust’ and the question of genocide

This article analyzes the debate about the controversial Canadian Museum for Human Rights by reconstructing the efforts to establish a government-sponsored Holocaust museum from the late 1990s. This history reveals that the controversy inheres in part in the conflation of the rival imperatives to promote atrocity memorialization on the one hand, above all of the Holocaust, and human rights education/activism on the other. In multicultural Canada, memory regimes, which utilize the egalitarian concepts of genocide or crimes against humanity to emphasize the suffering of all, also vie for official validation with the Holocaust uniqueness agenda. The article concludes that the museum is caught on the horns of a dilemma of its own making: the more it emphasizes commemoration, the greater the competition among migrant group leaders for exhibition space dedicated to ‘their’ experience. The more that human rights are emphasized, the less the interest from the private donors whose generosity is essential to museum...This article analyzes the debate about the controversial Canadian Museum for Human Rights by reconstructing the efforts to establish a government-sponsored Holocaust museum from the late 1990s. This history reveals that the controversy inheres in part in the conflation of the rival imperatives to promote atrocity memorialization on the one hand, above all of the Holocaust, and human rights education/activism on the other. In multicultural Canada, memory regimes, which utilize the egalitarian concepts of genocide or crimes against humanity to emphasize the suffering of all, also vie for official validation with the Holocaust uniqueness agenda. The article concludes that the museum is caught on the horns of a dilemma of its own making: the more it emphasizes commemoration, the greater the competition among migrant group leaders for exhibition space dedicated to ‘their’ experience. The more that human rights are emphasized, the less the interest from the private donors whose generosity is essential to museums financial viability.

Time, indigeneity, and peoplehood: the postcolony in Australia

Despite many differences between settler colonial states and the African successor states of the European empires, some important parallels are identifiable in the debates among their black intelligentsias. If in Africa and Australia the language of decolonization was (and often remains) suffused by the grammar of cultural distinctiveness, anti-imperial resistance and liberation, new voices can be heard that are challenging these terms of political struggle and collective self-understanding. The similarity of mood and sobriety among these revisionist intellectuals, and the co-temporality of their work, has not been registered so far. This article explores the dilemma of self-critique, solidarity, and group survival by reading the intense Australian Aboriginal discussion about ‘Indigeneity’ through the lens of Achilles Mbembes critique of postcolonial African states. For the past 15 years, and especially in his book The Postcolony, the Cameroonian philosopher has been advancing a highly original auto-critique of African black racial identity and nationalism that tries to avoid the trap of exculpating colonialism and confirming the prejudices of white racists. The article suggests that most Indigenous Australian intellectuals are unlikely to find Mbembes style of post-racialized identity intellectually interesting or politically useful because the status of Aborigines as a tiny minority in a settler society calls forth the very language of survival and autochthonous authenticity that he and others seek to surmount. Dissident voices find little resonance while the experience of attack and disintegration is intense.

Genocide and the Terror of History

The Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson initiated the Taskforce for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research in 1998 after visiting a Nazi concentration camp and learning that many Swedish school children were ignorant of the Holocaust. Holocaust education, he hoped, would promote democratic values. Two years later, the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust was founded, and the United Kingdom established an official Holocaust Memorial Day. Some ten years after the United States and forty years after Israel then, European political elites were institutionalizing Holocaust memory. Not for nothing did the German-Israeli historian Dan Diner observe that the Holocaust had become the ‘founding act’ of the new Europe, constituting ‘a catalogue of values which are of normative importance’, because the genocide had been the ‘negative apotheosis of European history’. One might go even further now that the United Nations has designated 27 January as ‘International Day of Commemoration to Honour the Victims of the Holocaust’.

The Nigeria–Biafra war: postcolonial conflict and the question of genocide

The Nigeria–Biafra war that raged between 1967 and 1970 made headlines around the world, above all for the major famine in the secessionist enclave of Biafra, and prompted a major international relief. It was a genuinely global event. Yet by the late 1970s, it was seldom talked about outside Nigeria. Since then, it barely features in scholarly and popular accounts of the period. The conflict is also virtually entirely absent from the field of genocide studies, which began to form in the closing decades of the twentieth century. However, in recent years, scholarly interest in the conflict is increasing. Alongside with a renewed literary interest in the war and its legacy, the international history of the war and the humanitarian operation in particular has attracted the attention of historians and academics of other disciplines. On the basis of a brief account of the conflict and the issues it raised, this contribution argues that the conflict should be considered by students of genocide, since its implications challenge some of the fields founding assumptions and premises. First, the Nigeria–Biafra war evinces the importance of conceptual history for the study of genocides. The article shows how concepts of genocide influence the perceptions and thus, in effect, the politics of conflicts, in particular in cases where representations of genocide are tied to the Holocaust, understood as a state-sponsored, ideology-driven racial hate crime. Second, and following from this point, scholars of genocide studies need to reflect on the impact of this understanding of the Holocaust on their discipline. As we argue, this model determines their (mis-)apprehension of other cases they discuss or—exactly because of this model—fail to discuss.

The Non-German German and the German German: Dilemmas of Identity after the Holocaust

Whoever thou art . . . by ceasing to take part . . . in the public worship of God, as it now is (with the claim that it is the Christianity of the New Testament), thou hast constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one. . . . I want honesty. If that is what the human race or this generation wants, if it will honorably, honestly, openly, frankly, directly rebel against Christianity, if it will say to God, “We can but we will not subject ourselves to this power” . . . very well then, strange as it may seem, I am with them. —Soren Kierkegaard

Taner Akçam, The Young Turks' crime against humanity: the Armenian genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)

A. DIRK MOSES Introduction Turkish-raised, German-trained and American-based, Taner Akçam is the Kaloosdian and Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University. His first book on the Armenian question was published in Turkish more than twenty years ago. Since then, a steady stream of monographs and articles, including A shameful act: the Armenian genocide and the question of Turkish responsibility (2006), has made him a pre-eminent authority on late Ottoman history and the Armenian genocide. The subject of this forum, his latest book, The Young Turks’ crime against humanity: the Armenian genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Ottoman Empire, appears in Princeton University Press’s prestigious Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity series, edited by Eric D. Weitz. Like its predecessors, this book is based on meticulous research, though surpassing them in detail and extent. Not for nothing did the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) give Akçam the Albert Hourani Book Award for 2013 for Young Turks’ crime against humanity, and Foreign Affairs name it as one of the best books on the Middle East in 2012. John Waterbury’s citation reads as follows: ‘The book’s title issues a stark indictment; the text methodically and dispassionately sustains it. The fact that a Turkish historian with access to the Ottoman archives has Journal of Genocide Research, 2013 Vol. 15, No. 4, 463–509, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2013.856095

Australian Memory and the Apology to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous People

The transformation of global politics in the early 1990s marked the end of the ‘short twentieth century’ (Hobsbawm 1994) and its Cold War certainties. If the collapse of the Soviet Union, end of apartheid in South Africa and fall of Latin America dictators indicated the victorious extension of the international liberal order, the outbreak of genocidal ethnic conflict in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and the Caucasus also heralded the return of integral nationalism. These events marked a new temporality and resultant new type of politics (Olick 2007). Because socialist hopes of a post-nationalist horizon had been dashed, grievances were now framed in terms of ethnic and national histories, which some observers interpreted as a regressive political imaginary of identity politics that divided peoples and occluded the persistence of structural oppression and inequality (Rolph-Trouillot 2000, 171–86; Torpey 2006). In particular, the plethora of official apologies, truth commissions and reparations payments for ‘historical injustice’ suggested a preoccupation with the past rather than the future.1 Certainly, there is no doubting the transnational extent of apologies by governments, heads of state, professional and commercial groups, religious organizations and spiritual leaders to exploited individuals and abused communities, living and dead (Celermajer 2009; Nobles 2008; Torpey 2002; Cunningham 1999, 285–93). Consider the following sample.

Genocide and Modernity

For the older generation of ‘genocide scholars’, an intimate relationship between genocide and modernity seemed so obvious as to hardly warrant investigation.1 After all, the frequency and scale of genocides in all parts of the globe during the twentieth century suggested that modernization crises regularly resulted in the destruction of human communities. It remained to reconstruct and compare cases by mixing the ingredients of the standard recipe: a base of utopian ideology, a packet of racial enmity, plenty of state terror and some indifferent bystanders, topped off by an uncaring global community. These scholars also had an activist agenda, more interested in predicting and preventing genocide in the contemporary world by exhorting the United States, where they lived, to ‘humanitarian intervention’, than in reflecting on the deeper causes of civil wars and regional conflicts.2 There seemed little point in pondering the nuances of such concepts when people were being displaced and killed en masse today.

Genocide and Holocaust Consciousness in Australia

Ever since the British colonists in Australia became aware of the disappearance of the indigenous peoples in the 1830s, they have contrived to excuse themselves by pointing to the effects of disease and displacement. Yet although ‘genocide’ was not a term used in the nineteenth century, ‘extermination’ was, and many colonists called for the extermination of Aborigines when they impeded settlement by offering resistance. Consciousness of genocide was suppressed during the twentieth century – until the later 1960s, when a critical school of historians began serious investigations of frontier violence. Their efforts received official endorsement in the 1990s, but profound cultural barriers prevent the development of a general ‘genocide consciousness’. One of these is ‘Holocaust consciousness’, which is used by conservative and right-wing figures to play down the gravity of what transpired in Australia. These two aspects of Australian public memory are central to the political humanisation of the country.