Jacques Semelin

Toward a vocabulary of massacre and genocide

Has the trauma of September 11th made us forget all the tragedies that preceded it? Has it made us forget the war in the former Yugoslavia that, this time 10 years ago, was at its height in Bosnia? Or the genocide in Rwanda, in which Samantha Power shows in her excellent book that the United States did all it could at the time to block an international intervention? Have we also forgotten the tens of thousands of deaths in Algeria, Timor, Colombia, Sierra Leone or Chechnya? The places in which violence has piled fury upon fury are too many to name. Have these conflicts disappeared from our intellectual horizon because we have now limited ourselves to considering the world uniquely on the basis of the categories of terrorism and the just war? Against this dominant tendency, this article attempts to renew reflection on some of these contemporary conflicts by focusing the analysis on the processes of extreme violence that characterize them and whose most spectacular and enigmatic manifestation is that of massacre. There are at least three reasons why this appears to be in need of analysis. The first is based on the very definition of massacre, as a form of action that is most often collective and aimed at destroying those who are not fighters but rather civilians, men, women, children and unarmed soldiers. Therefore, the question returns perpetually: why kill individuals perceived to be innocent or unable to defend themselves? The second regards the fact that the victims, far from being unknown to their torturers, often belong to the same community or village. This sudden descent into massacre between individuals that may have enjoyed good neighbourly relations for a period of years is stupefying. Massacre, understood here as a practice of proximity between executioner and victim, is often accompanied by atrocities that defy comprehension. Such acts are staggering to the “average” imagination. It would be impossible to suggest definitive analyses of these phenomena. Nevertheless, this text has the ambition of attempting to demonstrate the usefulness of a comparative reflection on massacre. Its aim is to go beyond case studies, or rather the presentation of the best of such studies, in order to better understand the processes that lead to the act of massacre. To this end, the analysis runs along two main lines. An historical grounding: it would in effect be difficult to attempt to understand the massacres of the 1990s without taking into account the history of massacre in the twentieth century, including those known as genocides. Trans-disciplinary openness: the phenomenon of massacre is in itself so complex that it calls for the contributions of several disciplines,

Taking Mann Seriously

Michael Manns two recent books offer a major contribution to the political sociology of mass violence. By developing and endorsing a comparative approach, the author wishes to explain the development of authoritarian regimes, above all fascist movements, as well as the phenomenon of ethnic violence. Considering the crucial and traumatic experience of the First World War as a cultural and social matrix, Manns definition of fascism is particularly concise and enlightening. Manns pages articulating the role of collective anxiety and even fear, prospering in a particularly unstable political, economic and international context and the security dilemma are among the highest achievements of the book. But what is disturbing in Fascists, is the deliberate choice not to take into consideration the historical and political realities of communist movements during the same period and ignoring Hanna Arendts thesis on totalitarianism. The Dark Side of Democracy is a book more innovative and inspiring than earlier works. Contrary to mainstream genocide studies, Manns work distances itself from the legal front. Sometime overusing the expression ‘ethnic cleansing’, a perverse definition of democracy can lead according to Mann to ethnic mass murders. In modern time, he notes, ‘the people’ has come to mean two things: demos (the mass of the population) and ethnos (the ethnic group that shares a common culture). Consequently, when an ethnic group claims ‘We, the people’, it can involve the rejection, even the eradication, of those who are perceived as aliens. But the murderous phenomena analyzed by Mann cannot be linked to the birth of modern democracy, but rather to a more general evolution, that is the formation of nation-states. What is at stake is not the dark side of democracy, but the dark side of the Nation-State in the modern democratic age. Another major contribution relies on the interpretation of mass violence based on the construction of a social imaginary. Before the massacre becomes an atrocious physical act, it is born from a mental process, from a vision of the other as a problem to be eliminated. It is crucial to distinguish more clearly than the author does two fundamental conceptions of ‘social purity’ that bring about two different figures of the ‘enemy’.

What is ‘Genocide’?

Since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Repression and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on 9 December 1948, this word—genocide—has come to mean absolute evil, mass atrocities against defenceless civilians. Created in 1943 by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, the term has known increasing international acceptance. Thus, one has talked about ‘genocide’ in almost every major deadly conflict of the second half of the twentieth century: from Cambodia to Chechnya, including Burundi, Rwanda, Guatemala, Colombia, Iraq, Bosnia, Ethiopia, the Sudan. . . and so on. The term has also been used retrospectively to qualify the massacre of inhabitants of Melos by the Greeks (fifth century BC), of the Vendean people in 1793 by the French revolutionary army, the native people in North America, the Armenians in 1915 including the cases of famine in Ukraine, the various deportations of population in the Stalinian ex-USSR as well as, of course, the extermination of European Jews and gypsies but also the American nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This list is by no means exhaustive. Applying this ‘genocide’ notion to these very heterogeneous historical situations raises many objections and passionate debates. These numerous ‘handlings’ of the concept express the need to resort to a word of universal significance to point out a major phenomenon in the twentieth century: that of the mass destruction of civilian populations. Other expressions have appeared such as ‘politicide’, proposed by Ted Gurr and Barbara Harff, or ‘democide’ by Rudolf Rummel, but the word ‘genocide’ continues to dominate the field of social sciences, and it has given rise today to ‘genocide studies’. The development of the new Journal of Genocide Research shows the dynamism of this field of study.