Genocidology (CRIMES OF ATROCITY) with Dirk Moses
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Just a content warning up top, this episode contains information about crimes of atrocity and mentions of the murder of civilians and children, sexual violence, the Holocaust, racism, religious prejudice, and of course, genocide. It's also at times a general bummer and does not reflect the usual lighthearted and comedic tone of apologies.

Also, I happen to be recovering from laryngitis right now. I apologize for the quality of my voice. Also, there are a lot of break-in asides for context and history. There's a lot of it just to help you keep up with the experts' references and to recap.

Oh, hello. It's a science podcaster and not a humanitarian rights lawyer, Allie Ward, with an episode we all wish didn't exist. It's an episode on genocide, which is historically deeply complex. It's a legal issue. It's a trauma issue. It's a finely woven political strategy. Before this interview, I didn't know a lot about genocide, really even technically what it meant. So

So I wanted to talk to an expert in the science and the sociology of genocide. I did a ton of research. All roads led to him. I even asked the opinion of other experts in the topic who said, interview this guy. So we did. I was fortunate that he made time for us. And if there's ever an episode to be brave and ask a brilliant person a not brilliant question, it's now.

What is genocide? How long has it been happening? Is it a war crime? Is it a crime of atrocity? Who makes up humanitarian law? What's self-defense and what's offense? How is it litigated? Whose business is it? Whose responsibility is it? Why do we do this to each other? What if you know that a situation is more complex, more detailed than is even divulged to the public?

Patrons via patreon.com slash ologies sent in great and insightful questions, which we ask. I even sent a draft of this episode to them first to get some feedback. Thank you for that. And also thank you to everyone who rates and who subscribes to the show. Thanks for the review this week from Comdor, who is a skeptically oriented scientist who said they will forever remain a faithful listener whether or not I read their review, which I did.

And thank you to everyone again for spreading the word about the show. Now, genocide. So it comes from the Greek for geno or race and side meaning to kill. So here we go. And I want to say here, I think...

think everyone wants the same thing. I think everyone wants to be safe, to have enough, to not feel threatened and to love who they love peacefully without watching their backs. Groups of people are made of individuals who are scared, who want safety, security and happiness and love. I want that for every single person listening. I want that for every person who is suffering or who has ever suffered.

I never want anyone to listen to the show and not feel included or understood. Everyone has a birthday and a first crush and hopes and songs that make them cry and a favorite dessert. Everyone deserves love and safety. Fear and threats and scarcity bring out the worst in humanity. And we look to forces...

greater than us to protect us. Who protects whom and why is it necessary? So with that in mind, this episode looks at violent conflict from a broad lens and then into the fine details of word by word international law. It is not an up to the minute news piece and we're covering as much ground as we can in a single episode to talk about historic genocides, the origins of the words and human conflict.

And of course, we'll be talking about the ongoing war that has turned into a grave humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But first, we'll lay out a lot of historical ground that's essential to catch you up to the legalities and the ethics of what's happening now and exactly what the humanitarian laws are.

Because you got to know that first. And at the end of the episode, once you have the expert's context and facts, I'll share some of my own thoughts on making this episode. Now, this is, in my opinion, the best expert we could have possibly gotten for the episode. He has been writing books about genocide for decades, has been a distinguished professor of global human rights history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also taught at the University of Sydney and the European University Institute in Florence in

Italy. He's currently a professor of political science and a researcher of genocide at City College of New York and has been the senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research since 2011. In 2021, he published the book, The Problems of Genocide, Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression. So please open your brains up like a giant satchel and get ready for a massive amount of information in history and context with Professor of International Relations,

crimes of atrocity researcher, author, and the world's foremost expert, genocidologist, Dr. Dirk Moses. First thing I'll have you do, if you don't mind, saying your first and last name. Dirk Moses, he, him. Great. And off the top, this is not an episode I necessarily ever thought I would do, but I'm really pleased to be talking to you when this topic came up.

I thought, I wish I could just sit down with Dirk Moses and talk to him about this. You're certainly one of the world's leading experts on this. Can you tell me a little bit about your personal and scholastic journey to becoming an expert in genocide? Sure, happy to. So as your listeners can tell from my accent, I'm not from the US, I'm from Australia. In my case, I have a German mother and an Australian father who studied in Germany where they met.

and he taught German history at the University of Queensland for a generation. So German history was in the household and in the family, and that meant Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, these kind of books were in the library, as well as German and Israeli colleagues who would pass through and chat, even as a lad, it's made an impact. And at university I studied Australian history where the question of indigenous people and what happened to them

This is now in the mid-80s. So, I went to graduate school in the US in the 1990s and in Germany and worked on a dissertation on post-war Germany and how it dealt with the Nazi past. At the same time, in the second half of the 90s, a heated debate developed in Australia about genocide in relation to the practice of stealing indigenous children from their families, a bit like the boarding school case in the US and Canada.

And I became engrossed in that and ended up writing on all these topics. And at some point, I joined them up in the sense of linking colonial imperial history to the German case. And I became interested in the concept of genocide, like why do we even have this concept? So I did a kind of conceptual history of genocide in my latest book.

So Dirk studied history, government, and law for his bachelor's. Got a master's in philosophy in early modern European history, another master's in modern European history, and his PhD also in modern European history from Berkeley. And his CV of papers and books and academic appointments and visiting professorships, fellowships, and grants and anthology contributions is 22 pages long, single-spaced, a 20-page

A 22-page long CV. He is no exaggeration one of the top global scholars in genocide and has dedicated the last 30 plus years to active examination on the topic. How he gets through each day without sobbing morning to night is something we'll address later. Did you find that the...

the World War II and the Holocaust, did that have any emotional impact in your family? Was it talked about growing up? Was it something that you felt that there was a presence on your mind about it? It was. I mean, I should add, so the listeners aren't confused, despite my surname, Moses, it's not a Jewish name. So it wasn't a Jewish household where obviously the, the impact of the Holocaust would be very different. So my mother's from a German Lutheran family and, uh, and my father's got sort of various diverse immigrant, uh, heritage. Uh,

But even so, the Holocaust was quite present. My mother was born in 1941, so in the middle of the war, and migrated to Australia in the mid-60s. And she became an academic leader as well, a university president, and instituted fellowships for Indigenous scholars, Indigenous students, and so forth. So she made this link between

German historical justice and Australian historical justice. And of course, my father taught these issues at the University of Queensland in Australia. The hardest part, it seems, about a lot of the discussions on genocide is defining it.

Let's start with the terminology's conception, which dates back to 1944 via a Polish lawyer who had escaped Europe and come to the U.S. to teach at Duke University in the early 1940s. Now, in his earlier years as a law student, he was outraged to learn of the Armenian Genocide and also anti-Semitic pogroms, which are massacres of groups of people. So Dirk gives us more background.

I did. His name was Raphael Lentgen and he was a Polish Jewish scholar. And he was living in Poland until forced to flee by the Nazis. And Poland itself had plenty of anti-Semitism at that point, which he had to confront, although he was also a Polish patriot. So he ends up fleeing via Sweden. He ends up in North Carolina at Duke University and he floats around American universities on the East Coast.

from the early 40s onwards and also does a stint with the U.S. government and is a sort of minor advisor during the Nuremberg Trials. The Nuremberg Trials, side note, took place in 1945 to 1946 after World War II ended, and we'll talk more about them later. But while the 1939 to 1945 World War II was still raging, lawyers and scholars were already discussing repercussions.

And an international debate is taking place by the time he gets to Duke in the early, sort of as of 1942, about, you know, what are we going to do with the Nazi war criminals when we win the war? Because by then, you know, it was a question of time. But at some point, we would overwhelm the Germans, you know, with the Soviets. And people were thinking, well, we don't want to make the mistakes of

So the First World War, of course, occurred between July 1914 and November 1918. And during this conflict, roughly 9 million soldiers died, but so did an estimated 8 million civilians.

And during this conflict, the German army deployed chemical weapons in the form of chlorine and mustard gas, despite that being against the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions, which were some of the first international laws in terms of war crimes. Also, during the First World War, the Ottoman Empire, now Turkey, launched what is now considered by dozens of countries as the Armenian Genocide.

So up to one and a half million Armenians died by death marches into the Syrian deserts where they suffered famine and lack of water and sexual assaults, concentration camps, and of course, mass murder. So after World War I, with the advent especially of new weaponry and this whole new military industrial complex, these crimes of war were on an international stage and it was time to look at them. And there were varying views on this.

But one of the things everyone agreed with was that there was a lack of international war on this topic. Like, what war would you prosecute the Germans for? You can't just make it up. And lawyers love precedents. They don't like inventing new precedents. They want to go back to an existing precedent. And there was an international debate about developing international law then in the early, mid-1940s. And it landed...

on various concepts and laws with the Nuremberg trials, the International Military Tribunal, as it was called. And there, the leading crime was crime against peace or aggressive warfare, not genocide. And then crimes against humanity and then war crimes. Yep. When you think of the Nuremberg trials, they weren't on trial for genocide. The charge was a crime against peace.

That is like stealing a tank and using it to intentionally kill people and then just being charged for like grand theft auto. I didn't know this and it's horrifying. So Lampkin was making a bid to be included, his new concept of being included in these trials. Now in the end, crimes against humanity, which was the alternative concept,

was only selectively applied because the great powers didn't want to have a precedent of applying crimes against humanity to their own citizens. They didn't want to establish a precedent that an international tribunal could prosecute America

for the crimes of Jim Crow or the British for what it does in its empire or the Soviets for what it did to its civilian population in the 20s and 30s and 40s, right? Which are terrible crimes. So despite these historical atrocities and massacres and use of warfare weapons,

violating international treaties and mass casualties seen in the Russian Civil War and revolutions, as many as 10 million, mostly civilians, there were still plenty of legal loopholes by design.

Law is a very specific discipline, and they carved out a quiet backdoor exit for those injustices. They limited it to wartime application, so crimes against humanity committed during the war, which meant that the German persecution of German Jewish citizens...

from 1933 to 1939 were not included. Why? Because they happened pre-war. So the big gaps in Nuremberg, which is kind of scandalous when you look back. So after the Nuremberg trials finished, the round one, I think in October 1946, various parties in the General Assembly said, look, you know, there are gaps here and we need to fill them. We need to have genocide as a possibility during peacetime, for example.

And a resolution was passed in the General Assembly calling for a convention. And that passed overwhelmingly, although the British were not really enthusiastic about this, the French were against it. The Americans didn't oppose it, but they weren't thrilled because they didn't want to establish, as I hinted before, an international law that could apply to them.

So over the next two years, in various committees of the United Nations, a definition was thrashed out and then agreed upon ultimately in late 1948. And that's the definition we have today. Now,

A couple of things need to be said about it. Lemkin had a very broad definition of genocide. And what is that definition exactly? Okay, so Dr. Lemkin introduced the term genocide in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. And in that he wrote,

Buckle up because this is verbatim and this is the foundation of the entire field and humanitarian law as it stands. So he wrote, "...by genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group and it is intended to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups."

with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan, he writes, would be disintegration of the political and the social institutions of culture and language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups."

Genocide, he continues, is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. And he writes that genocide has two phases. One, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group.

and the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor, which is allowed to remain after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor's own nationals. So by Lemkin's definition, stripping a national population of the things that make it so, like political and economic stability and physical safety, like

access to food and water and medicine and culture and religion and ultimately being alive so that the oppressing force can impose their national way on those people and that territory or just eliminate that oppressed group.

and take the land and colonize it. So that was Lemkin's vision put forth in 1944. And we'll be talking about the reaction and the acceptance of that definition and how it's changed since. But decades before World War I and World War II and the Holocaust and even Lemkin's definition were...

these international agreements and treaties. They were called the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which Dirk explains regulate what a state can and cannot do when it's occupying enemy territory. For example, a state can't transfer its own civilians into that territory, and it's limited in exploiting natural resources like mining and forestry.

Also included in those Hague Conventions, a state can't go executing civilians and there needs to be a pause in combat while non-violent negotiations happen, according to these historical Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. That governed how should occupying powers conduct themselves when they win in a war?

occupy foreign territory and then there's a period in which a peace treaty is thrashed out, you know, several months, maybe a year, the

the rights of the indigenous population or the occupied population are guarded and so forth. Now what Lemkin pointed out was that those laws did not foresee the radicality of the German occupation. What they didn't foresee is that the Nazis were intent on destroying nations, like destruction of collectives called nations and ethnicities, for example the Polish nation. So during the war, the Second World War, the Polish government issued these books

detailing what the Nazis were doing to Poland as a whole. They were executing elites. They were preventing the

education of children in Polish language, they were exploiting minerals and cutting down the forest. So kind of laying waste and plundering the society and its natural resources and leading ultimately, as they put it, to the destruction of the Polish nation. You know, they would talk in terms of the spirit of the Polish people and so forth. But they're referring to culture. There's sort of a generalized assault on, say, the Polish people. And

And part of the concept of genocide, as outlined by Dr. Lemkin, isn't just the destruction of a people, but the intent to commit cultural genocide or cultureicide, though the United Nations doesn't count cultureicide on its own as genocide. Now, when

Now, when looking at terminology, there are nations of people which share a language and a culture and typically the same geographic location. But a state is a group of people who live within formal boundaries and they share a government and political independence. So a nation is not necessarily a state and vice versa.

And in a world war wherein nations of individuals are victimized across different states, international laws can get blurred, explains. Now, of course, there was a generalized assault on the Jewish people. But bear in mind that the Jews of Europe were all citizens of particular states and the states themselves.

said, well, you know, we regard them as Poles, legally speaking. We want to prosecute the Germans for what they did to Polish citizens. Whereas the World Jewish Congress and other Jewish institutions quite accurately understood that the Nazis had an intent to destroy the Jewish people as such, which transcended these citizenships. In any event, Lempkin was trying to introduce the notion of the destruction of nations into international law, which crimes against humanity doesn't quite capture.

And when they're attacked just for being civilians, it's really protecting the category of the civilian separate from their notion of an ethnic or national identity. So again, genocide, which was not a legal concept during World War II, involves actions specifically targeting certain protected groups, national, ethnic, racial, or religious.

Now, war crimes are just that. They're acts committed or ordered by individuals during a war, and they involve inhumanities like taking hostages and torture and this wanton destruction of civilian property, sexual assault in wartime, the murder of prisoners of war, stealing from civilians, or drafting children into the military, and of course, mass killings and genocide.

Now, crimes against humanity as a legal concept is a little bit different. It involves actions targeting civilians in general, regardless of their national identity group, whether they are foreign or a part of the same state as the aggressor. And crimes against humanity can happen both in wartime and in peace. War crimes only happen during war. From what I understand in terms of the terminology, which is very sticky,

Hate crime, war crime, crime against humanity, and then as you call it or others call it, genocide, the crime of crimes, the ultimate crime to commit. Along the way up, who is determining what is a war crime, what is a hate crime? And also, as someone who is not well-versed in the art and the horrors of war, and this is going to sound like a not informed question, but it

It's all bad. You're killing all kinds of people for probably not great reasons when it's all a horror show and typically rooted in injustice and creed and defense. Anyway, what do those levels mean? It's almost like fire danger levels or something. What is that? This is a really terrific question and you get it. The notion of a crime of crimes was

posited by Lempkin, who was trying to enjoin his new category and concept as a very attractive option for people in the international community. You know, no one knew what this word was. It was a really new idea. But it caught on immediately because, you know, the Nazis had tried to destroy many nations. And so, of course, the leaders of those nations fastened on this new concept to articulate what they'd gone through. Now,

Technically speaking, in, say, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, there is no hierarchy. Crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide are co-equal. In case, like me, you need some context on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, let's get into it. This might be a long aside.

It's very informative. So let's start with the International Criminal Court. So this is a permanent international court of about 120 countries that have collectively agreed to prosecute individuals who commit crimes, including genocide and including conspiracy to commit genocide and complicity in genocide.

They also prosecute crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression, which is the use of armed force by one state against another. Now, the International Criminal Court, it all kind of came up and arose in the 1990s. And in 1998...

Many states gathered in Rome to outline their founding treaty, which is called the Rome Statute. And this is an 89-page document. It outlines those four types of crimes I just mentioned about genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression.

So when it came time to adopt this treaty, the U.S. requested that votes be non-recorded or cast anonymously. And 120 states voted to adopt, 21 countries abstained, and seven countries straight up voted against the treaty. But it was non-recorded, so we don't know who they are. Just kidding. Later, a New York Times reporter conducted a bunch of interviews and an investigation, which revealed which countries abstained.

voted against it. And the seven countries in opposition were, I'm just going to do this in alphabetical order, China,

Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the United States, and Yemen. So the U.S. has been in opposition to the ICC, this international criminal court, over the years, depending on the president and also citing that certain military actions are justifiable. And there were some other earlier criticisms of the ICC that it leaned toward Western states in favor of them, although it's most heavily supported in the global South. So I'm going to recap.

chronologically speaking, what we've got going on in terms of international courts and conventions and treaties for war crimes. So I mentioned the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, but there was actually the first Geneva Convention, which was before that. Now,

Now, the first Geneva Convention, this is a treaty established in 1864. As the U.S. Civil War death tolls were close to a million, there were battles and wars all over Europe, and there was a Swiss businessman, Henri Donat.

Holy shit, buckle up. Okay, this is a story. So Henry Denon from Geneva had a business going around to colonies in French Algeria, Indonesia, and growing corn in them. And in 1859, he's trying to get some land rights and some water rights. And he went to Northern Italy to schmooze with the French Emperor Napoleon III. And he had a whole booklet telling him how cool he was. He's hoping to get some favors.

And as he's there, he happens upon an Italian battlefield that is littered with 40,000 bleeding and dying soldiers and fresh corpses.

corpses with really no one helping anyone. This is like half of Coachella in bodies. So Henry, with this little booklet of praise he'd planned to use to kiss Napoleon's ass to do some colonizing, was like, hold up, what the fuck is happening here? So he started getting together local help. He rushes around, he finds a lot of women and girls, roundup supplies, and

He goes to negotiate to free capture doctors and use his money and donations he's collecting to put up emergency hospitals for the wounded, no matter which side of the battle they're on. Henri Denant then went on to establish an organization to help sick and wounded people called the Red Cross, which is really the seat of the Geneva Conventions. I didn't know that the Red Cross had anything to do with the Geneva Conventions until this episode. So in 1864,

We saw the first of four Geneva Conventions, which have been expanded over the years. But that first document in 1864 set out to make sure that wounded and sick soldiers were treated humanely and that humanitarian aid workers were also protected. Also, Henry, this guy who pushed for the Red Cross and all these conventions, well, he

He lost all of his money, and he lived in poverty, and he was shunned by his friends and acquaintances because of his failed business. He was sick, and from what I gather, he was couch surfing at the end of his life with people who would accept him in his old age. And then in the late 1890s, someone was like, whoa, this guy's life story is wild. More people should know about him. What ended up happening to him? Well, in 1901, elderly, frail, sick...

broke, Henry won an award, the world's first Nobel Peace Prize. And people were like, hmm, can you give him some of the prize money now? Because the dude is quite elderly and nearly penniless. So they put it in an account where his creditors couldn't tap it for his debts. And he lived a very meager existence so that he could will the rest of the prize money to humanitarian aid. Anyway, Red Cross, Geneva Convention's

a little backstory. Now, moving on to 1899 and 1907, pre-World War I, we had those Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which as Dirk mentioned, defined how an occupying force must act in regard to killing of civilians and exploiting natural resources and putting a pause on violence while peace negotiations happen.

Now, post-World War II, peace treaties and protocols were obviously kicked up a notch, to put that lightly. And 1945 saw the formation of the United Nations with what's called the UN Charter. This is a long document outlining its purposes and protocols.

And according to its preamble, the UN exists to maintain international peace and security and to take effective collective measures for the prevention and the removal of threats to the peace and to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights.

equal rights and self-determination of peoples and to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of economic and social and cultural or humanitarian character. And it also seeks to promote and encourage respect for human rights, for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

So the UN also established something called the ICJ. Now, this is the International Court of Justice, which is the sole international court that works on disputes between nations. It's based in The Hague in the Netherlands. And this is different from that ICC that we mentioned earlier. But if you're like, wait, what is The Hague?

Is The Hague a weird bunker where war criminals are held with no television sets or fun? No. Rather, The Hague is a city with an article in front of it, like the Seattle or La Paris. And The Hague is simply this whole ass Dutch city and it sits on the coast of the North Sea. And it happens to be the location of several international humanitarian courts.

including the ICC, which we talked about earlier, that can try individuals for war crimes, but that a lot of the possibly worst offenders don't endorse. Now, The Hague is also the headquarters of the UN's International Court of Justice, which can try nations as a whole instead of just individuals like the ICC does. Okay.

Okay, moving on, 1949. Additional conventions and protocol are added to those first Geneva Conventions, and they include protection and care for wounded and sick soldiers, and for those involved in maritime battles, and for prisoners of war, and lastly for civilians. It also calls for protections for civilian medical personnel and equipment and supplies, and it requires humane treatment for all persons in enemy hands.

And it specifically prohibits murder and mutilation, torture, cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment, the taking of hostages and unfair trials. And it requires that the wounded and sick and shipwrecked be collected and cared for. It also grants humanitarian aid workers the right to offer their services to the parties in the conflict.

So those are the additions to the Geneva Conventions from 1949. Now in 1977, more protocols are added to those Geneva Conventions, including one that recognizes that wars of national liberation, which are conflicts in which people are fighting against a colonial power to exercise self-determination, those conflicts against colonists are considered international, and those are subject to international laws. But

But remember, we were talking about the ICC, that International Criminal Court, and the Rome Statute, which brings us back to more recent stuff. So in 1998, that Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court laid out what war crimes are. And I'm going to tell you, they involve willful killing,

torture or inhumane treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly, compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of

the enemy or the hostile power, willfully depriving a prisoner of war rights to a fair and regular trial, unlawful deportation, taking of hostages, intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects.

objects which are not military objectives, intentionally directing attacks against personnel, material, units, or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or a peacekeeping mission, intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause

incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects and attacking or bombarding towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives. Now this Rome Statute, it's 89 pages of international law documents. So no, I did not read the whole thing. I read as much as I thought you could possibly pay attention to. But now you have a little bit of background on the Geneva Conventions and

The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. The UN Charter and the UN's International Court of Justice, which can settle legal disputes between states and give advisory opinions on legal matters on things like breach of previously agreed upon humanitarian treaties.

There are also the additional provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which can try individuals for crimes of atrocity. And those include crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression, and of course, genocide. Also, can I just say, yes, this episode is the least fun we've ever had together. I understand that. This aside alone is like a week's worth of work.

But if you like things like Dateline, well, boy, howdy, you should love war crimes and genocide because it's murder, but literally millions of people forgotten and dismissed by the governments who killed them. Isn't any death by the hands of an oppressive or combatant force a horrible tragedy in the eyes of the law?

However, as you've, I think, accurately pointed out, in international public opinion, let's put it that way, there is a de facto hierarchy and genocide is considered the worst crime of all, the crime of crimes. And I think that's got a lot to do with the way

There's a global memory of the Holocaust, and that developed over the last few generations, understandably. This is a shocking crime whose extent is hard to imagine when you think this is probably the largest murder of children in the world. Of the six million, perhaps, what, two million children? It's hard to get your head around. And certainly, if you try to envisage it very concretely, it would keep you up at night.

So intergenerational trauma is an ongoing consequence of war and oppression. And many studies have examined descendants of survivors. And there's this one 2019 paper, Intergenerational Consequences of the Holocaust on Offspring Mental Health.

a systematic review of associated factors and mechanisms. And this study looked at 23 different research papers of Holocaust survivors and noted that parental stress in a pre or postnatal period affects the stress system of offspring leading to epigenetic and cortisol level changes. And

And while this paper only gathered data involving Holocaust survivors, the introduction acknowledges that nowadays more than 65 million people around the world have been forced to leave home as a result of armed conflicts. And more than 21 million of them are refugees, of whom more than half are younger than 18 years of age.

and exposure to war and violence not only has major consequences for society at large, but also has a detrimental impact on people's individual lives. And I checked that paper's source for that, for those statistics, and via UNHRC, the UN Refugee Agency, it looks like since 2019, numbers have gone wildly up. And the most recent statistics as of the end of 2022 are

over 108 million people worldwide forcibly displaced right now. So research shows that the effects of violence and war and displacement and trauma affect how humans react to their environments and each other for generations. Do our bodies and our minds care about legal distinctions?

Now, there are a number of elements when you ask about who is to decide what's what, whether it's a war crime, whether any particular incidents of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. These are a league of issues in the end. It's one thing for these claims to be made, say, by activists on the street where advocates are saying this is genocide, this is genocide.

That's one thing. It's another for international lawyers appearing before an international tribunal like the International Court of Justice or the ICC, the International Criminal Court. That's quite another matter. And there they have to stick very closely to the law. The law has different requirements for each one. And

My sense is that the prosecutors, for example, at the International Criminal Court, they look at a particular case, like the DA, as you call them here, we call them Attorney General in Australia, when they're faced with a particular set of facts, say an unlawful killing, they will say, do we have the evidence for murder one?

You know, where it's hard to prove intention, et cetera. They just look to see what they think they can prove. And again, the International Criminal Court prosecutes individuals for war crimes, including torture and mutilation, corporal punishment, hostage taking, acts of terrorism and violations of human dignity, such as rape.

and forced sex work and looting and execution without trial. So those war crimes would be committed during a war. But the ICC also prosecutes genocide, which are acts with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, or a religious group. They also work on crimes against humanity, which would be widespread or systemic attacks directed against any civilian population.

And crimes against humanity don't have to happen during wartime. Now, the ICJ, that's a different international court. That's the International Court of Justice. That's the one started by the UN. And that handles not individuals, but disputes between the states when a state doesn't follow a treaty or a convention or when a mediator is needed.

And the UN Security Council can also enforce provisional measures. But some countries can exercise veto power and shut down those actions. The United States has exercised this veto power almost as many times as all the other nations combined. Just last week, the U.S. issued a veto on an otherwise highly biased

and popular resolution that would have potentially given Palestine full UN membership, which many people say seems contrary to the U.S. saying they want a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. But when can these courts get involved? So the UN's International Court of Justice can gather and order provisional measures, which are kind of like a temporary restraining order.

if there's reasonable plausibility that a nation is committing crimes of atrocity. You may have heard that in January of this year, South Africa accused Israel of genocide in Gaza via airstrikes causing mass civilian casualties and of obstructing humanitarian aid into the region. And the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take measures to prevent and punish genocidal acts against Palestinians.

And since January, South Africa has raised more concern about starvation in the region. And the UN Food Agency's data deemed that famine is...

But the response from Israel claimed that the charges were, quote, And so that is ongoing. In the case of the Rwanda genocide in the mid-1990s, wherein government-led gangs murdered over 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hoodoo Rwandans over 100 days, it was not only a case of genocide,

It took three years before the International Tribunal began the cases. And the tribunal wasn't officially closed until 12 years after that genocide. Ultimately, 61 people were convicted for ordering and inciting the genocide.

Now, in terms of other modern genocides, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, this was established in 1993 by the United Nations in response to the Bosnian War from 1992 to 95, which involved mass slaughter of ethnic groups in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Macedonia. So

So one particular event in July of 1995 saw the massacre of over 8,000 men and boys who were Bosniak Muslims. And the tribunal, in response to those war crimes, was in operation until 2017, a full year.

15 years after the massacre. Now, in Myanmar, there have been ongoing expulsions and killings of the Muslim Rohingya people by the Myanmar military, and the Republic of the Gambia brought this case to the International Court of Justice in 2019. And a year later, the court ordered Myanmar to take measures to prevent further genocide, though the conflict and the case remains ongoing a full eight years after the start of that violence.

which Myanmar insists is simply a retaliation against illegal immigrant attacks. Clearly, the narratives change depending on the vantage point, which is why rulings on these issues can take years while the crises rage on. And the requirements for genocide are particularly difficult.

which is one reason why at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the one for the former Yugoslavia, which wrapped up a few years ago, decades after the crimes of 1994 and around that period, most of the people who were prosecuted were for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Now, why is genocide so difficult to prove and therefore to some extent considered a higher crime, although that's an illusion in some ways?

Because as you say, we're all talking about mass violence against civilians, you know, and war crimes and crimes against humanity are bad enough. It shouldn't be shocking us.

It's because this is intent requirement in genocide. You have to have the intention to destroy and holler in part an ethnic, racial or religious group as such. Those last two words are critical and they're sneaky. As such. And the as such was added in during these convention negotiations in 1947 and 48 to limit the genocide concept as much as possible. Because, and you can see this in the debate transcripts,

various people pointed out saying, well, you know, the Allies killed quite a lot of German civilians in the aerial bombing. Didn't they drop two atomic bombs in Japan? These were non-combatants, really. You know, you could argue some of the factory workers were somehow participating in the war effort. But this will be captured by a broad definition of genocide. So a distinction was made between a military logic to defeat, which may kill millions of civilians, and a genocidal logic to destroy,

And the rationale was that when the war is won, the killing stops. Whereas with genocide, destroying the enemy is an end in itself. The war, the point of the war is destruction of an enemy group. As I point out in this recent book, The Problems of Genocide, if you take that to its logical conclusion, it's perfectly legal to kill as many innocent civilians as

in the conduct of war as you would in a genocide by arguing, well, this is a military logic or military campaign to defeat an enemy and not to destroy an enemy. And so, yes, in current and past cases, the intent of eliminating or exterminating a group of people versus the, we have to do this for military reasons, is

Now, in the real world, we might consider impact over intent. So I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, but I did. So I apologize and I'm going to learn and do differently. But in war and military,

And in his 2021 book, The Problems of Genocide, Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, he writes...

Why privilege the intention of states and their armed forces? I dispute the doctrine of double effect, i.e. doing harm for the prospect of good, that permits the killing of innocents as a side effect of a moral end, like self-defense.

What does it matter to civilians if they're killed by violence inflicted with genocidal or with military intent, he writes. So yeah, Dirk says a problem with the term genocide is that prosecution of it is tricky. The term genocide is legal macrame. It's a lot of loopholes.

Which conflicts have been found to be genocides? And like you said, it takes decades sometimes of going through this legal system. Which ones that we're familiar with may or may not be genocide? I know obviously people have heard about the Holocaust. Some people haven't heard about the Armenian genocide. Canada recently distinguished residential schools as a genocide. However, the U.S. has not identified

all looked at their treatment of indigenous tribes. So which have been deemed a genocide? Was Rwanda? Was Bosnia? Which ones have gotten that label? Sure. Once again, this allows us to disaggregate the theaters or sites in which these kind of decisions are made. One is governments like the government of Canada or what have you.

through a parliamentary resolution deeming various cases to be genocidal. And this is not really a legal determination. It's not a court of law. It's a political agency or entity. And I think in Canada there are five or six that they've denoted to be genocide. And they're the ones that are then represented in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, about which I've written a bit and visited a few times. So because it's a government entity, they rely very much on the government's line on this.

And as a little background on this, for 160 years, Canadian policies forced First Nations children into residential schools, separating them from their families and cultures and killing roughly 6,000 Indigenous children, as we discussed in the Indigenous Phytology episode with Dr. Lee Joseph. Now, the last residential school finally closed in 1996.

And in 2022, the Canadian government finally recognized these acts as genocide, which is historical progress, like finally an admission of a genocide. It took 200 years for that.

But don't feel too misty about this kind of meager act. Our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, helped produce and research and encourage this episode for the last few months we've been working on it. And she notes that as a Canadian, for her, it's very frustrating to see because very few of Canada's national truth and reconciliation commissions calls to action in regard to child welfare and education and health, justice, language, and actual rights.

reconciliation have actually happened. And mostly it's just acknowledging or appointing someone to think about a problem, but there have been virtually no material or policy changes. So that's a government acknowledging a genocide, which is different from a conviction. Okay. So that's one context, a very political one. The other is these legal tribunals. And I've mentioned two. One is the International Court of Justice, where states sue each other. It's a UN court.

The other is the International Criminal Court where states aren't placed on trial but individuals. So the people who were prosecuted

who are being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court and by these two tribunals. So there the prosecutors are given evidence about the conduct of particular individuals, usually government officials or military personnel, and then they try to piece together a case and then they make a judgment. Can we get genocide across the line or should we prosecute them for war crimes or crimes against humanity? Either way, if they're successful, they're locking them up for decades, if not forever. Okay.

But they just make a strategic decision, as I said, like a district attorney about which crime best fits the facts. So it's very context dependent and often quite a political decision as well as a legal one. But, you know, it's difficult to say in a sort of a fundamental way or absolute way, you know, such and such genocide has been universally recognized by somebody as existing.

Now, the exception is probably the Holocaust because there is a UN-mandated Holocaust Memorial Day in late January. So mark your calendars for January 27th, which is the anniversary of the closing of the Auschwitz concentration camp after the war.

liberation from the Soviet army. So it's a day to remember the six million Jewish Holocaust victims. And the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that it can be commemorated by lighting candles, reading off victims' names, and confronting anti-Semitism and any hate we encounter in daily life. Now, are all genocides a Holocaust of sorts? I wasn't sure about that. In a word, no.

So the etymology of Holocaust, first off, it comes from the Greek for burnt offering or an animal sacrifice. And the term the Holocaust, capital T, capital H, refers just to the attempted extermination of European Jews. That is the Holocaust.

Now, April 24th is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which in Los Angeles, where I live, features a lot of Armenian flags on buildings and cars and gathering and a lot of awareness raising for that. April 7th has been designated by UNESCO, which is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, as International Day of Reflection on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

So different tragedies have different distinctions, but not all victims have days of remembrance yet.

And UNESCO has a whole project and program of raising consciousness about that, which I think is a good thing. But that's the exception rather than the rule. Because just say, this is something I was teaching in my genocide class today, we refer to the East Pakistan Liberation War, secessionist war in 1971, where Bangladesh emerges from the ashes of what was then East Pakistan. People are unsure about the death toll that ranges from half a million to three million.

Now, of course, the Bangladeshi state is adamant that this is a genocide as it claimed at the time in 1971.

And this should be universally recognized. But of course, the state of Pakistan vehemently opposes that. So it becomes a huge diplomatic question. And so it's therefore difficult to settle on it. So genocide from a legal and a punitive standpoint is very difficult to prove, no matter what the civilian toll or the horrors. Now, if it's hard to prosecute, then is there ever even a consequence or a deterrent? I

And you mentioned locked away for decades, possibly forever. Is there a very different punishment or reparations? Why would a country that is already, say, committing atrocities or has committed atrocities want to avoid that label if they did the things that they did? Yeah, it's a good question. So when the Darfur case was raging 20 years ago, which is a region in Sudan,

and was widely regarded as genocide here, particularly in the US. The UN sent in an investigative committee or commission, and it said that crimes against humanity were being committed, but not genocide. And there was an audible sigh of relief in the African Union saying, well, okay,

Nothing to see here. It's not genocide. It's just crimes against humanity. And I was appalled by that. And it was one of the impetuses to write this book about what I call the problems of genocide. Like, why is that considered a win? You know, crimes against humanity is one of the most serious international crimes. So clearly there's this stigmatic aura that attends to genocide because it is somehow relatable back to the Holocaust because the Holocaust was

stands as its archetype or ideal type. You know, it's the textbook case of genocide. So if you're saying that something's genocidal, you're saying that it also has somehow, somehow, a relationship or resemblance to the Holocaust.

And again, the Holocaust refers to the nearly 6 million Jewish victims targeted for their religion and identity in an effort to eliminate them. But also during World War II, the Nazis killed 4.5 million Soviet prisoners of war and 1.8 million Polish people.

The Nazis killed 300,000 Serbs, 300,000 disabled people, up to a half million Romani people, plus Freemasons, Slovenians, and up to 15,000 LGBTQ+ people. Jehovah's Witnesses were also killed for the religion.

But the Holocaust, again, refers to that attempt at elimination that is fundamental to Lemkin's initial and to the modern definition of genocide that's been debated in and out of courts for decades since its conception. And no state...

wants that, given that the Holocaust is universally reviled as, you know, the largest genocide in world history. I mean, which state wants to have that on their books to blot their copy book? You know, that's one reason that Turkey vehemently disputes the Armenian case that there's genocide. If you look at the government apologetic statements on it, they say,

that the Nazis committed a genocide. We didn't do anything like the Nazis. There was a civil war going on or civil disturbances going on during the First World War when the allies invaded, including Australians in 1915, April, and we were just putting down a rebellion. I mean, that's usually, that's the rationale by states. What they don't say is how they put down the rebellion. States do have a right to maintain law and order, especially during military conflict.

And that doesn't mean you can't deport the entire population and murder its political leaders. In other words, this excess, which I call permanent security, is clearly illegal. And I think that's really what the logic which drives what we call genocide is.

And in his book, Dirk explores the ills of this so-called permanent security, which he explains is, quote, the striving of states and armed groups seeking to found states to make themselves invulnerable to threats. Permanent security is the unobtainable goal of absolute safety that necessarily results in civilian casualties by its paranoid tendency to indiscriminate violence. And he writes quite simply, permanent security is

should be illegal. Now, in working on this episode, I happened to take a break to visit the cinema and see the film movie, Dune II. And when the pasty bad guys, the Harkonnen, call their oppressed enemies, the Fremen, rats and bellow to kill them all, it made me think back to all the genocidal rhetoric

through time, the calls for annihilation of certain groups of people, the wiping away of indigenous populations to make room for colonizers, the use of language like animals or barbarians, and this intent to wipe nations out of existence. Now, if the Harkonnen were ever tried in the International Court of Justice, statements like "rats" would be dehumanization.

and kill them all would be intent to destroy. Those would make it into evidence. But when is it self-defense? And I know that the language of transgression, obviously, very huge theme of the book and how things are defined. And I understand that one look of genocide is that it's asymmetrical, that it's really against one group with the intent to eliminate them from a group that's in power.

Where do the lines blur when something is seen as retaliatory or it's a retaliation for colonization? When you go far back, there are so many...

religious divisions and land disputes and resource disputes, how far back does it go to decide who is at fault? And I'm curious about this in one of the earlier genocides in South Africa in 1904, where that was an uprising against German colonists and obviously in so many conflicts. So where does that, where does that retaliation come in? Okay.

So you're really pointing to the explanatory nexus, you know, what causes mass violence against civilians. And in the case of German Southwest Africa, which is now Namibia before the First World War, which was governed by Germany, you're quite right.

There was an uprising by the Herrera and Nama who were responding to the crisis of their society caused by the terms of German exploitation and rule. And so it's inevitable. You know, if you occupy and exploit the people in a colonial context, there will be often a violent reaction.

That doesn't make it right. And especially they did attack some German farmers. But this is sort of, if you like, a war of history. And once again, we need to separate normative from analytical points. Why do these things happen?

And in that case, when indigenous populations in what is now Namibia rebelled against occupation and killed around 100 German settlers, it sparked retaliatory genocide that killed somewhere between 35,000 and 100,000 Southwest Africans via starvation and dehydration from being driven to the desert without access to food and water.

and thousands of others were sent to concentration camps to die of disease and injuries inflicted by German forces. Now, this incident is now known as the first genocide of the 20th century, and it wasn't until over 100 years later that Germany issued a statement of apology, saying that it, quote, "...bows before the descendants of the victims, asking for forgiveness for the sins of our forefathers."

Thank you.

They wrote. Now, remember, in 1977, new protocol was added to those Geneva Conventions, which addressed wars of national liberation and what can't be considered a legitimate target of military attack. So it prohibits indiscriminate attacks or reprisals directed against the civilian population, civilian objects, objects indispensable to the survival of

of the civilian population and places of worship and the natural environment. So reprisals for uprisings within a territory or against occupiers of territories are considered international. Now, the Geneva Convention's 1977 protocol notes that violations of these prohibitions can be considered grave breaches of humanitarian law.

and classified as war crimes. So one army's war of national liberation or revolution might be called a rebellion or guerrilla warfare or an insurgency by occupiers. So where you are literally standing greatly influences where you stand. And we're talking here about colonial contexts. Observing this, we can see that, indeed, the mass violence against civilians is triggered by

colonial occupations often, whether within Europe or outside Europe, because you had them in Europe as well. You had empires and occupations. So it's not just outside Europe. And then you have the resistance to that. And then you have this excessive reprisals by the occupier. This is what was noted by Ptolemy Las Casas, the famous Spanish priest in the 16th century who wrote these celebrated pamphlets about

criticizing the terms of the conquistadors, conquest of the Americas, the so-called New World, which started this praxis in Europe of criticizing excesses of state power, particularly in these occupation contexts.

In any event, Las Casas' pamphlets became sort of a core celebre around Europe and translated into many languages and illustrated with these sort of comographic images of murdering and exploiting natives, as it were, of Latin America and South America.

and commenced a style of critiquing state power. One of the terms that Las Casas uses, and then we use to the present day is events which sort of quote unquote, "shock the conscience of mankind."

You know, that would shock us. He would then in graphic detail list the things that the Spanish did. Okay, so the English translation of the Spanish Catholic La Casa's writings include scathing passages such as this one he wrote to the king. If your highness had been informed of even a few of the excesses which this new world has witnessed, your highness would not have delayed for even one moment to prevent any repetition of the atrocities which go under the name of conquests.

Given that the indigenous peoples of the region are naturally so gentle, so peace-loving, so humble, and so docile, these excesses are of themselves iniquitous, tyrannical, contrary to natural canon and civil law, and are deemed wicked and are condemned by all such legal codes.

I therefore concluded that it would constitute a criminal neglect of my duty to remain silent about the enormous loss of life, as well as the infinite number of human souls dispatched to hell in the course of such conquests.

Again, this was in the 1500s. La Casa continues that on the mainland, we know for sure that our fellow countrymen have, through their cruelty and wickedness, depopulated and laid waste an area once teeming with human beings.

At a conservative estimate, he writes, the diabolical behavior of the Christians has, over the last 40 years, led to the unjust and totally unwarranted deaths of more than 12 million souls, women and children among them. And there are grounds for believing my own estimate of more than 15 million to be nearer to the mark.

There are two main ways in which those who have traveled to this part of the world pretending to be Christians have uprooted these pitiful peoples and wiped them from the face of the earth.

First, they have waged war on them, unjust, cruel, bloody, and tenorical war. Second, they have murdered anyone and everyone who has shown the slightest sign of resistance or even of wishing to escape the torment to which they have subjected him. So, La Casa's pamphlets, decrying slaughters done in the name of his religion, spread and awakened people worldwide.

And this style of writing resurfaces for hundreds of years to highlight injustices of forced labor and slavery and brutality against workers. And Dirk uses the example of the 1890s Belgian Congo's labor exploitation on rubber plantations, cutting off the hands of workers who didn't produce enough in the writings that came in response to that. And I know right now we're like, Lacoste, I want to stand him.

but just a little more on his background. Early in his life, he was an owner of slaves. And though he was an advocate for indigenous rights, he remained okay with enslavement of African peoples if their acquisition was the result of a legitimate conquest of war.

So as far as a 16th century ally goes, he was not unproblematic. But jumping ahead. So what Lemkin did in the 1930s and 40s is come out of that tradition. He himself referred to Las Casas in his own writings and placed himself in that, if you like, humanitarian tradition. Now, that didn't mean they were against empires. It was still very Eurocentric.

But, you know, let's not massacre the natives. If we're going to employ them, let's do so on humane terms. But no one contested in Europe that Europeans had a right to be there because there was a right to engage in trade and commerce and

as they even called it, and try to convert people. So Lemkin wrote about the Latin American case. He called it Spanish-American genocide. And I actually wrote an article based on these unpublished papers with a colleague in Sydney, Mike McDonald, who's an expert on colonial America. You know, Lemkin understood that the mechanism for violence was the arrogation of the Spanish that they had a right to be there and a right to take the land and to exploit these people.

And that, you know, naturally there was resistance on the part of the, I'll call them the Indians for want of a better word. And of course, anyone who is not should defer to indigenous, native, aboriginal, individual nations or confederacies as to preferred terminology. From a legal standpoint in the United States and Canada, at least 30%.

the term Indian is still in legal framework, like the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs, which just further illustrates the lag in the law to catching up to actual lived experience.

Yeah, but there are so many historical instances of uprising against occupation or colonization resulting in what legal scholars may deem asymmetrical military reproach. The massive violence came in the retaliation. He traced a similar pattern, and I think that's largely right. So, for example, in the case of German South West Africa, you mentioned from 1904 to 1907,

There was a colonial occupation as it was destroying indigenous society. There was then a resistance to that. And this resistance isn't always very nice. It can attack the settlers and not just soldiers, right? Civilians and combatants are kind of conflated. Because from the perspective of the colonized, the families of the settlers are as dangerous as the soldiers because they're replacing us.

You know, they're having children, etc. I mean, it's a terrible logic of demographic warfare, but that's what settler colonialism represents. It brings the logic of demographic warfare into these societies because settler colonialism isn't just about exploitation. It's about replacing one society with another.

So one demographic replacing another, as was the case of Aboriginal populations and the Australian colony or North American colonization. But in, say, colonial India, there wasn't necessarily a strategy to replace the existing population just to exploit them for resources and labor. But, Dirk says, what's distinct about the genocide of the Holocaust? Is that...

Jews of Europe were not engaged in a rebellion against Nazi rule or against any much rule, right? There was no, if you like, combative nexus. I mean, after they were attacked, Jews joined partisan groups and others, you know, in the forests of Russia, but only after the assault by the Nazis. I mean, there you have this curious temporal lapse because...

the Nazis, along with many right-wing Germans, regarded the loss of the First World War, so 1917, 18, 19, when the home front collapsed with the strikes and so forth, and the labor unrest, as the result of pacifists, liberals, socialists, who they affiliated with, you know, quote-unquote Jewish power. So it's a highly anti-Semitic imaginary. So

When the Nazis got to power in 1933, they said, we're not going to let that happen again. So we're going to round up the people who betrayed us at the end of the First World War, leftists and Jews. And when they then attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, which they regarded as a Jewish power, as

They thought Bolshevism was effectively a Jewish movement, if you like. And in case you'd be in a panic as a Jeopardy contestant, the clue would be a far left faction of the Marxist-Russian Social Democratic Labor Party established by Vladimir Lenin and renamed the Russian Communist Party in 1918. And the question answer would be, what were the Bolsheviks?

And they weren't the only ones. So did many Westerners, Roosevelt, Churchill. They all thought somehow the Bolsheviks were Jewish. I know it sounds weird today, but that's how people ticked in those days. So the Nazi logic was to be preemptive. We need to round up and lock up and murder people before they can become Jews.

And what I learned from that is that in the minds of the perpetrator, which you really need to understand for genocide because it's a crime of intention, you need to get in their head and understand what they think they're doing, crazy and delusional and paranoid as it may be. Now, that doesn't justify it. You have to try to understand. They really believed that Jews...

a military danger because they were joined with the Bolsheviks or they were engaged in sabotage and so forth. And at least that was their pretext and it was preemptive. And so the

They justified the killing of women and children and so forth as a preemptive measure before they can produce more children who would eventually become opponents to our regime. Now, especially with the killing of children amidst such a terrible subject, it reminded me initially of what I'd seen in the colonial American history, which is the nits make lice argument, which some of you may recall. That is, on the American frontier, and the same was in Australia,

You need to kill native children before they become warriors. And that way you annihilate possible resistance at its source. You know, root and branch, you rip out the roots, this kind of botanical metaphors were very common in genocidal language. And the more I looked, the more I saw that kind of thinking as driving mass violence against civilians. Again, Harkonnens and Ratz.

Now, in his book, Less Than Human, Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, the author and philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith notes that victims of the Rwanda genocide were called cockroaches and vermin. Armenians were called dangerous microbes by the Ottoman Empire.

empire and Nazis referred to Jews as subhumans and rats. Now in the recent International Court of Justice case raised against Israel, a South African lawyer noted that the Israeli defense minister in October of 2023 said they were fighting human animals.

and that the language of systematic dehumanization is evident in the Israeli military strategies. But of course, on the other side, sources like the Anti-Defamation League quote a 2023 sermon by a Hamas official calling their opposition filthy, ugly animals like apes and pigs because of the injustice and evil they had brought about in regard to the occupied lands of Palestine.

But the Hamas 2017 charter makes note that it is in opposition to the Israeli state and the occupation of Palestine, not the Jewish people. And others point out the false equivalency of the state of Israel, a government body in a country, and the nation of ethno-religious people that live there.

Now, psychiatrist and philosopher Franz Fanon, author of the 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, wrote extensively on this subject of dehumanization, saying that colonial rule is itself the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native. And he wrote that in order to justify the violence required of colonialism, a notion of inferiority has to be projected onto colonial subjects.

And Fannin wrote that those oppressed by colonialism become so dehumanized that attempts at defense, quote, turns him into an animal. One might argue that dehumanization is a core tool in getting people to kill others out of fear or defense or greed. Now, in international law, genocide is a complex case of intent, power, and oppression.

What is so disconcerting or confusing in all this is that the Holocaust being the archetype of genocide is a case where the victims were passive. They weren't engaged in a rebellion. And that becomes the archetype of genocide. And so people since the war wanting to claim that they're victims of genocide tend to shoehorn these complex military beliefs

circumstances into this simple binary of victim and perpetrator where the victim's utterly passive, which distorts the reality. For example, in the case of East Pakistan that I mentioned, you know, there was an independence movement in East Pakistan and, you know, there was an insurgency and then there was a counterinsurgency.

Now, there was actually a preemptive counterinsurgency by the Pakistan government. The Bangladeshi resistance movement, independence movement, you know, was real. The Pakistani government targeted this resistance movement first and foremost, the leaders and students who were nationalists and so forth. And then they went down and preemptively attacked males who could be possibly in the resistance forces and hundreds of thousands of women are raped.

So this is seen as genocide by the Bangladeshis. But, you know, the Pakistanis say, well, this is just a side effect of armed conflict. And it doesn't really resemble the Holocaust. It is very different. And yet it's also true that lots of innocent civilians died because of the excesses of the Pakistani state. So the genocide concept is a very different

ambivalent or ambiguous concept that we've inherited from the end of the Second World War. And it really confuses and distorts the way we understand

armed conflict and the way that civilians are attacked for it. In all, it's hard to define. The concept of genocide is a very historically situated and contingent concept. It doesn't necessarily name a stable fact in world history. These circumstances vary greatly. And then it omits many cases that we really should be thinking about if we're interested in mass genocide.

casualty events. I mean, what was the largest civilian mass casualty event after the Second World War? It was probably the Great Leap Forward in China, where historians talk about over 40 million people dying between 1958 and 1962. The

forced modernization and collectivization of agriculture. Now, I was unaware of this, but he's referring to the late 1950s, early 1960s economic campaign by the Chinese Communist Party that sought to gather agriculture from farms and redistribute it. But due to many, many factors and blunders and exaggerated projections of what that increase in agricultural labor could return, there actually wasn't enough for people to eat. But leaders weren't keen to admit that.

And what resulted was this tragic and staggering and preventable and so-called man-made famine. One scholarly publication estimates that 30 million Chinese people starved to death and about the same number of births were lost or postponed. Genocide is not the right word for that. The government of China, the Communist Party, did not intend genocide.

to go out and kill 40 million of its civilians, of its citizens. But when it found out about the mortality, nor did it stop. This was a price that needed to be paid for the modernisation of China and for the elimination of any counter-revolutionary elements and for the collectivisation of agriculture. So if international law were to properly categorise these kinds of crimes, we'd need different concepts and different causes.

Again, the legal designation of the crime of genocide can only be applied where there is intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

and identifying intent is a huge factor in prosecuting and hopefully preventing future genocides. Now, when I posted this episode to patrons at patreon.com/ologies, I was in the middle of recovering from some difficult medical stuff. You can see my March field trip episode on my mystery surgery, but I asked then if there was interest in covering this scholarly field of genocide, and I got a lot of great feedback, almost all encouraging.

Brianna L. said, this is such an important topic to cover. Adam Foote said, my grandmother survived the Holocaust, so I'm extremely interested in an episode on this topic. Annie G. says, I'm interested in this episode and not just because I'm an Armenian American. Corrine L. said, I would love to hear what your expert has to say. I've been hoping you would do this one since October. Thank you. And Steph B., having read through a lot of the questions that y'all submitted, said, I'm just amazed at the depth

of questions on here. I took a course in college that was all about Hitler's rise to power and to this day think that should have been a required humanities class. So many people really don't know or understand how much genocide occurs in the world and education on the topic is much needed.

And I'm really doing my best to give you the history and the context to understand what we talk about when we talk about genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. And you had great questions. We're going to get to those that you submitted in a moment. But first, just a quick break. And before that, every episode we donate to a cause of Theologist's Choosing. And this week, Dr. Moses asked that it go toward student support at the Colin Powell School of the City College of New York. Because he says many of his students are first-generation college students.

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Okay, on to your questions. Now, as I mentioned earlier, our lead editor, Mercedes, she's been a listener and a patron before she became our editor, but she encouraged and produced and did amazing additional deep research for this episode. So huge thanks to her for that passion and that hard work. And when we recorded, I invited her to be on the call. First one, I'd love to open the mic to Mercedes. I know that you were really passionate about this episode and have a question too. We'd love to toss in there.

Yeah, what's on my mind, what I've wondered is what is the role of cultural narratives around in groups and out groups and the way that people see themselves in their group's history and understand their worldview? How do those sort of identities and narratives form into culture?

support from civilians in seeing mass casualties of other civilians that they see themselves as other? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question because it allows me to talk about processes of what we call racialization in the literature and whether they are at the basis of genocidal violence. Sometimes these are called discourses of dehumanization. This might be what you're getting at. And once again, they're context specific because

you know, what one group, say majority population, thinks about a particular minority will be very different in one country than another, depending on religious affiliation and difference and so forth. So,

I think that racialization, which leads ultimately to, if you like, racial hatred or ethnic hatred, national hatred, is not enough to explain why mass violence takes place. So diversity isn't the problem. The fact of cultural, religious difference is a staple in world history. Think of the Ottoman Empire.

So this was the largely Muslim empire governed from what is now Turkey that spread through southern Europe and across North Africa and the Middle East for hundreds of years until the end of the First World War. And it was a highly successful empire in many ways, although it was in decline during the 19th century.

It had millions, millions of Christian subjects when it occupied what is today the Balkans. So, you know, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and so forth, Bulgaria, which is why you have Bosnian Muslims. Okay. That's why there are Muslims so far into Europe. Now,

These groups, which had differences among themselves, you have different Christians, you have Armenians, you have Assyrians, you have Greek Orthodox Christians. So there's a lot of differentiation, as well as Jews and different kinds of Muslims lived more or less in harmony by the standards of the time.

and people respected each other's differences. There wasn't much intermarriage, but there was a lot of sociability attending each other's weddings, especially in mixed villages and towns, respecting each other's religious shrines, which were often shared because of their monotheistic religions. So there was a, you know, this wasn't necessarily springtime for everybody, and there were hierarchies, right? This was an Islamic empire,

Christians that weren't going to serve in the army, they had to pay an extra tax and were allowed social status. But, you know, Christians also participated in the governance and were often very high officials. So it was in some ways a very porous empire, hierarchically too. I mean, that's why historians are fascinated by and write about it. So historically, there have been many religious groups living in a state of somewhat harmony, a collective of different backgrounds and beliefs.

Now, when does this complex culture or civilization become murderous? It's when you combine the difference that people recognize, which does come with prejudices and so forth, with a sense that this group is a threat. You know, when is a group considered a security threat? Not just that the group is different, because, you know, a group can be different. You may not like them, but that doesn't mean you kill them.

You can just be socially superior to them, you can exploit them, you can dominate them, but it's not a logic of destruction. When do you want to destroy them? It's when groups are considered a threat. And that is usually during or immediately before an international conflict or a civil war. And the group is seen as an ally of the external enemy. So a friend of your enemy becomes your enemy.

And according to the UN Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes, other risk factors include weakness of state structures, the military capacity to commit atrocity crimes, triggering factors, intergroup tensions or patterns of discrimination against protected groups, signs of an intent to destroy in whole or in part a protected

group, serious threats to those protected under international humanitarian law, and serious threats to humanitarian or peacekeeping operations. Now, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, Armenians were striving for an autonomous region within what is now Turkey.

where they were large in number but never a majority. And the Ottoman government resisted this, obviously. But Christian powers like France, Britain and Russia sponsored

the Armenian strivings and acted as an external protector. So in the early 1900s, leading up to World War I, Armenian separatists were backed by big players who were a threat to the Ottoman Empire. And this, in the minds of the Ottoman elite, made Armenians sort of an international threat as a representative of these foreign powers that wanted to dismember our empire. And this culminated in the genocide during the First World War when

radicals within the Ottoman state said, "The war allows us cover to deal with this Armenian problem once and for all." Because once we get rid of them, then never again can we have separatist tendencies. Dirk says that he's observed this in the case of the Myanmar military's expulsions of Rohingya Muslims, 700,000 of whom were forced to leave in 2017 so that separatist movements wouldn't recur.

But humanitarian law, for example, the Fourth Geneva Convention, recognizes that displaced persons have what's called a right of return. And if they've been evacuated, they can return to their homeland. And in his book, The Problems of Genocide, Dirk notes that, quote, while Arab governments successfully evacuated,

insisted that the right to return to his country be included in Article 13 during the UN Declaration of Human Rights in December of 1948. He writes, It came a year too late for Palestinians, as conflict over the establishment of Israel during the 1948 Palestine War saw over 700,000 Arabs from Palestine expelled or forced to flee their homes during the establishment of the state of Israel. And Dirk writes that,

quote,

It also made any return contingent upon the refugees' acceptance of the new state of Israel. In 1949, the UN recognized Israel as a state but not Palestine. And today it's estimated that 70% of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees from what is now land settled by Israel.

Now, a second Great Exodus occurred during the 1967 Middle East War, which is also called the Six-Day War, the June War, the Setback, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, or the Third Arab-Israeli War. Either way, several hundred thousand Palestinians were displaced and fled further into Jordan, Egypt, and Syria.

Now, in 1978, the UN published the right of return of the Palestinian people, noting that the majority of the Palestinians have been, quote, in exile, unable to return to their country despite the right of those wishing to return to their homes. Now, on the other side is Zionism, which comes from the Hebrew word for an area in Jerusalem. And this has been a movement pursuing a Jewish state on lands that are historically linked to Judaism thousands of years ago.

Now, following the genocide of the Holocaust, Britain, which controlled the lands of what is now Israel and Palestine, endorsed the formation of Israel. However, initial agreements of what land would be an Arab state and what would be a Jewish state have not been observed.

or have changed after military conflicts. Now one point of massive contention is what some people call a false equivalency between Zionism, which is nationalist support for the state of Israel, and Judaism as a religion and a culture, with some equating being critical of the Zionist movement or Israeli military policy as being anti-Jewish.

Now, this confusion or bias has led to incidents of anti-Semitism, but has also been confusing for those trying to understand the separation between a state like Israel and a nation like Jewish people, which some argue are one in the same and others say are

two different things entirely. There has been vocal support of Palestine by Jewish protesters or during demonstrations that stress that criticism of Israeli military action is not directed at the Jewish community, but the state of Israel itself. Of course, as you know, debates rage on. But again, throughout history and across the planet, Dirk says that in conflict between states and civilians,

governments have sought to quell uprisings and it's led to humanitarian rights violations. Rather than say, "Just arrest them," let's expel the entire population or most of it through murderous burning of villages and terrorism. And that way we will never have a separatist problem again. So expulsion is one mode of dealing with this perceived security crisis, you know, which states experience as existential, like it affects the integrity of their borders.

Another version is mass incarceration. Dirk mentions a 2011 separatist attack by a Uyghur Muslim group against Han Chinese residents in a border state of China that involved the fatal stabbings of six people with another 27 injured. They use that as a pretext to lock up about a million people for quote-unquote re-education purposes to de-Islamicize this population and to exploit their labor. People eventually get out of these prison complex prisons

but are then heavily surveilled as the Chinese state has the capacity to do that. In order to destroy any sense of community coherence, which could be the basis of a separatist claim. Now, this is not a powerful movement, but it's enough to establish a pretext for the Chinese security services to crack down on the entire population, which means you are attacking uninvolved, innocent civilians. And this is clearly criminal behaviour in a broader sense, though,

It's very difficult to prosecute a state for crimes it commits against its own civilians, right? Not an international situation. And leaving that aside, what about the political question of like, how do you really squeeze a great power like China? It's in the Security Council, let alone Russia. You know, this is the real problem in the international system is that, you know, when great powers or the members of the Security Council are directly involved or their clients, then the possibility of prosecution breaks down.

And side note, there are 193 UN assembly members, but the UN Security Council is composed of just 15. Five of them are permanent. China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The other 10 are non-permanent members, and they include five for African and Asian states, one Eastern European state, two Latin American or Caribbean states, and two Western European or other states. And so let's say...

that one of those five permanent members, China, France, Russian Federation, the UK or the US, wanted to, say, exercise its veto power. It could smother some issues that the rest of the UN Assembly or the UN Security Council is trying to address.

And since 1967, the U.S. has used its veto power almost exactly as many times as the other four permanent members combined. So if you're allies with the U.S. or other permanent U.N. Security Council members, you've got friends in high places. I've gone very much off-tangent, but I think the takeaway for the listeners is that

you need two processes. You need racialization and securitization. And securitization, so when groups are seen as a threat,

And a lot of people wanted to know, namely Patricia Evans, Zoe Litton, the Awkward Cactus, Min, Dr. Wiggles, Aaron Everton, Becky the Sassy Seagrass Scientist, and Annabelle. How long do you think humans have been like this? How long have humans been trying to eliminate others based on identity?

Well, they're based on identity linked to political threats. So people have lived in mixed communities since time immemorial, not just in little tribes, but in bigger civilizations. Diversity is actually the norm in global history. The exception is this period of modern nation states when they're conceived of as large tribes or families, you know, Germany for the Germans, where everybody's

white and blonde hair or so forth, right? Now, these were projects from the middle of the 19th century roughly onwards, which tried to fashion a homogeneity out of heterogeneity

Because, in fact, these societies were very diverse. And in order to make something homogeneous, states need to intervene to kick people out. You need to sift and filter the population. So the power of the modern state is very elemental here. And states didn't have that kind of power until the last 200 years or so. Until the middle of the 19th century, European states and the Ottoman Empire, they didn't keep a census. People didn't have these formalized names and so forth.

So that's something we need to bear in mind historically. Now, there are people who think that there's a death drive, thanatosomy. There's something anthropological about the way humans interact, which can culminate in genocide. So death drive is this itch that is scratched with aggression or self-destruction as

as a release of tension through killing or chaos because humans, technically speaking, are animals. But is that why humans destroy each other? Well, no doubt. Communities, large and small, will hunker down into offensive crowds if they think they're threatened. But it's one thing to engage in vigilance.

All states, like humans, have a right to be vigilant. It's quite natural. If someone walks across the street and tries to strike you, you put your hand up to defend yourself. What you get with genocidal violence is something I would associate with hypervigilance, which the psychologists talk about. And that's when you're looking for...

people, you're anticipating people that might harm you. And you act preemptively, you go across the street and attack the person who you thought might be about to attack you. And with genocides, I'm seeing that. And that's why there's this temporal slippage, you know, you're attacking an entire group today, to make sure they can't be threatening in the future.

You got that in the Holocaust, you got that with this "Nits make lice" logic and colonial warfare I mentioned. You get that with the Myanmar case with the Rohingya. Let's expel murderously the entire population so that never again will there be a secessionist threat. And doing so means you're attacking innocent civilian people who had no direct connection to the secessionist separatist attempts.

This potential, I think, is embedded in the fact that we live in states. States have borders. States have bureaucratic and security apparatuses. And self-preservation is a natural right of states, like it is of human beings. And we're talking about the security and military apparatus of a state, which is, in a sense, always looking for threats. That's their job, right? If they think that the state is threatened, they will engage in all manner of threats

nefarious activities, legal and illegal often, to deal with that threat, whether it's a series of individuals or a neighbour or a social or political movement within its order. And we social scientists get very nervous when we see

excessive threat perceptions circulating, say, in the media or emanating from important politicians who are saying such and such people are a mortal danger to our society because, you know, not everybody is in a position to think about these things rationally. People are easily scared.

and think, oh, my God, these people streaming across the border in any given country are threatening our way of life or they're rapists or what have you, criminals or insurgents. So let's round them all up, put them in camps or send them back or what have you, some drastic security measure. Not always will it amount to genocide, like incarcerating entire groups like, for example, Japanese-Americans during the Second World War is not genocide. But it's clearly a human rights violation.

You know, and there have been apologies quite rightly issued since then. And as a side note, during World War II, the United States incarcerated at least 125,000 people of Japanese descent. And estimates are that two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens.

put into internment camps simply because of racial hysteria about their ancestry. Many of these people were on the West Coast, Washington, Oregon, California. And you all know I love the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. It's like a second home to me. And one exhibit is called Becoming Los Angeles. And among the artifacts are several trunks used as luggage by these forcibly removed Japanese citizens.

And the NHM notes that the trunks, quote, "...confront visitors with something familiar, packed luggage, to make forced relocation more of an understandable reality. What possessions would you bring knowing that you might never see home or the rest of your belongings again?" It continues, "...the luggage emotionally anchors the story of the Japanese Angelenos forcibly removed from their homes and relocated against their will without trial or charges."

The day of remembrance for these relocations is on February 19th. Also recently, my friend Daylin Rodriguez told me about repatriation drives during the Great Depression, during which up to 1.8 million people were deported so as to open up more jobs to non-minority people or white people. One researcher estimates that about 60% of those deported to Mexico during the Great Depression were American citizens exiled separately.

simply because of race. So these things happen and they get buried in the history or buried in the news while we focus on the Oscars or the Super Bowl or the Met Gala or depending on who's telling the story, they get minimized or

or even worse, they get normalized. So one of the problems of this fixation on genocide is you detract attention from the driver of all, you know, which leads to these kind of policies and understand genocide as part of the continuum of repressive policies by state when it's dealing with perceived threats. And one aspect of your book and a huge aspect of your work that I think is really fascinating is that this quest to prove or to label something as genocide is

can cause harm in that it almost...

ignores these mass atrocities that might slip through those cracks. What do we do? Listeners, Pistachish, Ken, Rachel Gentile, Kate Thames, Brian Chart, Tiger Yuri, Katherine Napinski, Matt Sicato, Marianne Thomas, Jennifer Langford, April Carter all wanted to know what can we do to prevent or to stop it? And first time question asker Atlas asked how we can systematically transform the conditions that might lead to further genocides in the future.

And I'm wondering, you know, now that people have cell phones, now that media is so quick, we're becoming more and more aware of things in real time and the actual horrors, especially to civilians. From an international standpoint, what should our response be? What should our actions be? I know the prevention of genocide is something that has also been really sticky, and you've written on that, but we're seeing this debate of, is this genocide? Is this not? Does it matter?

What do we do? So this allows us to pivot very much to the present day and observe what's happening on the streets of the US, Australia, around the world, which are mass protests for ceasefire in Gaza.

and the release of hostages. I think that's sometimes not mentioned, but I think that's intended as well. So yes, demonstrations both call for the releases of the hostages taken by Palestinian militant group Hamas during the brutal attacks on October 7th that killed over 1,100 people. But in recent weeks especially, we've seen a rise in protests on college campuses calling for a permanent ceasefire in the region as the death toll in Gaza has reached over 34,000 people, including more than 14,000 children.

with another 8,000 people missing. And in the last week, clashes have erupted between counter-protesters to pro-Palestinian protests.

with serious injuries and thousands of arrests for occupation of campus property. So the global question is, when is force or defense or opposition deemed justified? There are so many dimensions here. One is the case by South Africa and the International Court of Justice against Israel, accusing it of genocide. Then these interim measures or provisional measures which are issued by the court, which have been largely ignored by Israel.

And then, you know, the mass protest movement, which is putting pressure on the Biden administration because they might lose the state of Michigan, an important swing state, in the upcoming election. So you can see there are sort of many different spheres here. One is legal, one is domestic, domestic political, and so forth. And then there's the issue of international reputation. You know, no state wants to be accused of genocide, let alone be hauled before an international court.

And especially not Israel, which understandably argues that the Genocide Convention exists because of what happened to Jews during the Second World War. And a reminder that historically, charges of genocide typically take years to litigate. Meanwhile, conflicts continue, oftentimes despite provisional measures from international humanitarian tribunals and courts.

Does it even make a difference is the big question. Now, I'm not going to get into the rights and wrongs of the genocide claim here. It's before the International Court of Justice. As a social scientist, I'm interested in the politics of all this. The fact that the claim of genocide has become an article of faith in Palestine advocacy circles because I've experienced this firsthand. If you're seen to question that, we'll say things are complicated, though not denying any of the conduct by Israel, which is...

I think international lawyers around the world see clearly as war crimes and maybe crimes against humanity. But, you know, people that can quibble because the law is so quirky. Men, your attack is a genocide denial. I mean, this sort of absolutization of political rhetoric was, of course, intended by Lemkin when he invented the term because it wasn't just to prosecute genocide. It was also to prevent it, as you said, Alec.

So it's meant to be sounding the alarm. I mean, people may say, maybe alleging, look, you're a crying wolf. This is not what a genocide. This is just a regular war with collateral damage, as it were.

Unfortunate term phrase, but unintended consequences of bombing in a heavily urban area where the enemy is buried underneath it. This is not much Israel can do. This is the line of reasoning. This absolutization of the political rhetoric, which is then accused of being crying wolf.

Another scholar who's weighed in on this is Israeli genocidologist Dr. Roz Siegel at Stockton University, who has said that despite the inciting factor of the October 7th attack by Hamas, the counteroffensive by Israeli defense forces and the blockade of humanitarian aid, water, power, and fuel is, in his words, quote, a textbook case of genocide.

And Siegel cites three acts, killing, causing serious bodily harm, and measures calculated to bring about the destruction of the group as genocidal in intent. But I don't have to tell you that this topic is contentious. This was the point of the Genocide Convention. And that word, it was meant to catastrophize politics because it is a catastrophic situation, whatever you call it. There's a mass slaughter going on of Palestinians, which is only going to get worse as the

And some experts, like the program director at the World Food Program, have said that there is, in her words, a full-blown famine spreading across Gaza. But declaring an official famine is a complex legal process, which should come as little surprise by now.

And again, if one state supports the allegations of genocide against another, then that would set a legal precedent to re-examine some of its own past or current military actions. And the effect of the rhetoric is now plain to see. The American government is very nervous about the optics. It's now sending an aid, whether by the air or the port they're going to erect.

and construct on the coast criticism of the Israeli government. Not that it's going to not ship arms to them, but you know, it has changed the rhetoric of American policy. And I think many states in the United Nations, and particularly in the global south, are convinced that this is genocide. That's easy to see from those that supported the South African case in the International Court of Justice. And this episode is not meant to be

up-to-date reporting on this conflict. But on the eve of releasing this, Hamas has agreed to a ceasefire deal, but Israeli airstrikes have hit Rafah in the southern part of Gaza, and humanitarian workers report that the flow of aid has been halted at the Gaza-Egyptian border. And I'm sure this will change by the time the episode is published in less than 24 hours. So this is not to inform you of world events up to the minute, but to give you some history and some context of the conflicts.

So obviously this is a huge debate around the world and scholars of genocide are being called on to examine and compare current events to historical precedents. So the war is not a panacea. Like international war is not going to change the conduct of states if they think their survival is at stake. And reading the statements of Israeli leaders, it's clear that they do think their survival is at stake.

So this conflict isn't going to go away. And, you know, the genocide rhetoric is just sort of one tool among many that, or one lever, that, say, a protest movement can pull. Dirk says that the issue of so many civilian casualties and the type of military campaigns being used

is a different and more complex question. The crime of genocide is not so much about the how or the how many, but about the whys, the intent. Why is that happening? That's in a sense a broader problem or broader issue.

And there, we'd need another whole podcast for this, Ali. Then there would be debates about occupation, the justice of occupation, the justice of resisting occupation, whether there's an occupation. Is settler colonialism the right analysis here, or is that anti-Semitic? You know, this is a whole other can of worms which we can't get into right now. But that is a conversation which is happening now.

along with the genocide conversation. Now, what can people do? Now, far be it for me to tell anyone what to do because people have very strong opinions on this one way or the other, particularly in the Middle East. If you are concerned about the armed conflict or about the civilian casualties, well, we can observe there's a very mobilised

a protest movement calling for a ceasefire. So this was recorded before the college campus demonstrations of the past few weeks started to gather momentum. So, you know, I'd say these protest movements are

are having an effect somehow by changing the tone of political debate. Even CNN is now focusing on the children who have been killed in Gaza. And once again, you notice that the emphasis on children, which is entirely legitimate and understandable, is interesting because they're depoliticized non-combatants.

But in fact, legally, men who are not in Hamas are as equally innocent under the Geneva Conventions, right? But that doesn't work in the way people imagine major injustice. People are focused on women and children in particular. That's why the gender aspect is also fascinating, as well as disturbing in all this. And there's also the aspect of sexual assault being used as a war crime or a crime of atrocity.

Although those statistics and claims have historically been overlooked or unverified. Now, two patrons had questions that were lingering in my own mind. Chicken Chomper and first-time question asker Ms. Nowak, who wanted to know, is there any truth to the saying, quote, all wars have been started by men? Well, one of our listeners asked, which I think as a woman, I'm definitely guilty of thinking this as well, is, is it men who

Is it dudes? Where is genocide coming from? Where is the gender aspect? Where is the aggression coming from? This is a very important question. There's two elements to it. There is a feminist critique of statecraft, which emphasizes, if you like, the toxic masculinity of this emphasis on revenge and retaliation, which you're getting from the Israeli government and from Hamas. You kill our civilians, we'll kill your civilians. You terrorize us, we'll terrorize you. It's just trauma being acted out and playing out

And the trauma is real, mind you. I'm not trivialising that. But the feminist approach in the literature that I'm reading and what I've seen in talks by colleagues and so forth is to try to channel that in another direction, not a violent one.

Now, that doesn't mean you give up on armed resistance. From a Palestinian and the perspective of other occupied peoples, armed resistance is always an option. But that doesn't mean you kill their women and children. You know, you restrict it to combatants, which would be more consistent with international law. So fear breeds hate, breeds fear, and continues, some would argue, in an ever-increasing cycle of defense and trauma. Yeah.

So I think there is a plausible gender difference there.

However, that doesn't mean that women aren't participating there as individuals in genocidal rhetoric and policies. There's plenty of evidence for that. So you need to distinguish the agency of particular women who can participate, or in Rwanda as well, can participate in genocidal conduct from a gendered analysis where the kind of militarised politics we're seeing now is clearly very masculinised. And in my view, it brings out the worst in everyone.

And women suffer terribly. And, you know, I know we've got to let you go. Last questions I always ask. Typically, I ask what sucks about your job. But given that you are a senior editor of a journal of genocide, I imagine that there's a lot that presents a challenge. But how do you, as someone who studies this,

How do you go on and do this every day, especially when so many people want to bury our heads in the sand and aren't equipped to fathom the atrocities? How do you do this?

Yeah, well, it's not easy. I mean, I want to first say I'm a very privileged operator. I have a nice job at the City College of York where I have very good conditions and I haven't had any immediate trauma of mass violence in my family. So whereas some of my students have, who are mainly first-generation students from the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, often migrant backgrounds, and the reason they're here is that their parents are escaping horrific and terrible conditions in other parts of the world.

And I know because they tell me, because I'm teaching a class on genocide right now. That doesn't mean, though, that anyone, even in a relatively privileged position like mine, can't be vicariously affected by the material just by seeing on social media, you know, every day the videos of children being blown to bits or buried under destroyed buildings. That does take its toll. So you have to, I think, be careful about that.

Yeah, looking away because you will get intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, the kind of classic symptoms of PTSD. I've experienced that in the past before. But this is something that can affect anyone. And in fact, what I observe with the, if you like, the catastrophization of political rhetoric, which you clearly got in the Middle East, but also in the U.S. now, is

is that people are exhibiting PTSD-style politics. It's traumatized politics, and people are yelling at each other in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Dirk points out that the October 7th attacks saw the highest number of Jewish people killed at once since the Holocaust.

While Palestinians feel that the military strikes driving people to the south of Gaza, where more military strikes are carried out, is a new Nakba, a new catastrophe or disaster. When one might argue that at the root, all anyone wants is safety for them and their family or their nation or their group, no matter what the price.

And this happens when we forget that we are all members of humanity. It's a traumatized and traumatic politics. And that is imported into societies where you have people who are affiliated with that part of the world, Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, and so forth. So there's kind of a territorialization of that conflict into our societies. I'm not criticizing them, I'm just observing them, right?

And you're seeing that on the streets of our cities where you have demonstrations. Now, it's important in a healthy democracy that these things can be played out in a non-violent way and that there are opportunities for people to decatastrophise. And this is where I think the gender element comes in. We did an event at City College yesterday with the head of our counselling centre and then a couple of us scholars who talked about these issues with 70 students in our Colin Powell School and

who were all heavily involved one way or the other, and that's why they were there. And the head of the counselling centre talked a bit about, you know, how we all deal with trauma and whether it's direct or indirect and the importance of listening, not necessarily forgiving, but understanding the perspective and emotions of people on the other side. And that, she said, at least gives you pause and might help

resist the temptation to immediately strike back, whether rhetorically or otherwise. And hopefully just reduce the temperature a bit in the way we discuss these things. Which I hope this is done. And do you have any glimmers of hope that as we become more informed and potentially more unified through some sort of digital global community, do you have any hope of

things improving or of these kinds of mass atrocities being called out sooner and stopped? Well, no, I'm actually pretty pessimistic because the, you know, well, let me just look at the, look at the falsification that takes place, you know, before our eyes. And with

And with AI entering the chat, news outlets making their money with highly partisan content, political circles devolving into infighting, and kind of a hot take economy where people online are paid with attention, it feels like it's never been harder to wade through infighting and biased information.

Meanwhile, at these places of conflict, it's life or death, physical and emotional horrors, tragedies, terror and existential threat. And people can watch this in real time and they're shocked. And this, you know, this is nothing compared to what Russians, you know, the Russian bots are doing to Ukrainians.

or the or Chinese bots due to OIGs you know and then within Ethiopia you have this conflict in Tigray in Sudan I mean wherever you look that in Latin America as well there are terrible conflicts going on and those that are if you like telling us about what's going on instantly discredited you know AI just makes it easy to invent quotes invent pictures and so forth so I'm actually quite pessimistic now in terms of the why there's more mass violence going on well it's because there's

There's lots of causes for destabilization within states. Like, for example, there's...

conflict within Sudan, which is massively destructive and we're not hearing much about. And a quick reminder, it doesn't have to be legally deemed genocide to be a crime of atrocity. You know, as a result of political instability. And there's a fair bit of that in many African states as well. Now, genocide isn't always the concept that best explains what's going on there. But there's mass violence against civilians. There's a series of multidirectional conflicts in Eastern Congo, for example,

Now, as climate change worsens the situation, particularly in those sub-Saharan states, and leads to the collapse of agriculture, and then more massive migration streams, especially heading to Europe, we're going to see much more of this. So I think once you factor in climate change and the, I think, pretty quick collapse of agriculture among large swaths of Europe,

Southern Europe, parts of Africa, Latin America, you're going to see much more migration and refugees. And just look at the hysteria about that topic in this country, let alone in Australia over the last 30 years, where I come from, where even a trickle of boats across the East Timor Sea leads to hand-wringing about the security of our borders. In a really wealthy, secure society,

Shit's getting worse. It's going to get worse. Yeah. As one of the foremost experts on this topic, any words of advice to trying to promote any kind of unity, any kind of action, any kind of...

soothing of this. Yeah. No, I know an American one needs to leave with an uplifting statement. Well, he got me. I was looking for anything. Now, if you're concerned about victims of violence or of generational trauma, Dirk says to try to keep in mind that those wars do not need to be mirrored in emotional or physical violence across the world.

My parting word would be just try to lower the temperature in terms of political rhetoric, decatastrophize. There's a tendency to catastrophization, which is really a manifestation of a trauma and a traumatized sensibility. Let's try to contain it. That doesn't mean forgive and forget because the reason there's a traumatized sensibility, because there is trauma. There's

mass migration because of mass murders that occurred in the country you came from. This country has its own traumas with the history of slavery and indigenous genocide. So these things can't be wished away in some kind of kumbaya moment. But we need to listen to people when they're talking about what happened to our people. One of the dilemmas in a vibrant

diverse place like America and Australia is that sometimes the communities, the victims and the perpetrators are living here. Whether Jews and Ukrainians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, Turks and Armenians, there needs to be a way of conducting politics which doesn't repeat the genocidal energy of those places, let alone the genocidal energy that led to

you know, the fate of Indigenous peoples in this country. Yeah, that's a great note to end on too. Thank you so much for doing this. I know your time is very valuable. Thank you for spending so much of it with us. It's a pleasure. It's great that we've been recorded still. We're just about to turn it off. No, it's a pleasure to talk and I'm happy to make time. It's important to get the word out there that academics write books.

to be read and they don't do it for the money. They're not best-selling authors who get their books at the airport bookshops. So one way to get the word across is to do a podcast like this and talk to intelligent and sensitive people like you. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

So ask informed people uninformed questions because that is truly the only way to learn something. And it's better to learn than to stay intimidated and overwhelmed and uninformed. And this is a postscript that I'm adding a few days after the episode first went live because I wanted to answer a few questions that I've had from listeners and a few comments that I'm like, let me clear that up. So most of you have said this is exactly the standalone information you needed and you wanted to share. And a

a few others were disappointed that I didn't take a more personal stance and make the episode more about me and my thoughts and my position, which I will admit surprised me a little bit because the act of making this was a pretty big personal stance. And I want to be defensive because I'm like, hello. But as we know, defensiveness is a fear-based reaction. Vulnerability is scarier, but it's what you deserve.

Because sometimes advocacy can be terrifying, not because of blowback from the people who disagree, but because if I don't thread a certain needle, I lose folks who need to hear information the most. I also had to be really careful of leaving opinion out of this because a

opinion can be argued. And as soon as that happens, then the credibility of the episode suffers. I used to be a journalist for the LA Times. I was at the LA Weekly before that. And so when it comes to ethics and journalism, if it is an important topic, unless it's an op-ed piece, you keep yourself out of it.

you deliver facts and you let people make up their own minds because that is more effective than telling people what to feel. The last thing that I want to do is harm anyone or make people feel like they as a human being aren't welcome to the information. Maybe for you, seeing footage of children

crushed under rubble and decapitated civilians is too legitimately triggering for you and you may avoid this news altogether. Maybe life is terrifying and you feel helpless because your government does what the fuck it wants and you may figure you don't matter in all this. Maybe you've been the victim of anti-Semitism or Islamophobia and this topic is really personal and brings up a

a lot of legitimate generational trauma. I have to have all those people in mind when making a high stakes episode like this. So while cathartic screaming into an echo chamber feels great, and I would love to sometimes, I've been in this sitcom rodeo for many, many years. And with the high stakes issues and contentious topics and a long format platform, I have found

greater efficacy when first disarming defensive oppositional forces to engage people's rational, logical, prefrontal cortex rather than the scared, angry, or defensive limbic system.

When it comes to issues like trans rights or reproductive rights, I don't waste air directing hate toward transphobes who are only going to double down because they feel threatened. Instead, I prefer to platform diverse guests so that people who have never had a trans or a non-binary friend now know one through the episode and realize everyone is just people. And the biggest difference is whether we collect rocks or like frogs and stuff.

sometimes both. Also with this episode, I tried to follow exactly what the expert asked me to when discussing this, which is take the temperature down and lead with history and logic and legal precedent, and also highlight the reality that trauma causes more trauma in an upward cycle of violence. So it was a shitload of info, a microscopic needle to thread, and I thought long and hard about it. And of course, I respect your comments if you didn't understand the

the whys of how I approached it. We worked on this episode for months. I was so inspired by the passion and the knowledge of people in my life, like my husband, Jared, of course, Mercedes, and so many people sharing their on the ground stories and images and reading news updates on this. And it's clear to me that what is happening now in Palestine is horrific and against humanitarian law and treaties. But

bombardments of areas that were supposed to be a refuge or literal refugee camps and the high civilian death toll and violent dismantling of vital infrastructure. It's something that I think will be studied for decades and centuries to come as humanitarian rights violations.

And yeah, I believe it's a genocide. What happened on October 7th was also horrific and against humanitarian law. That doesn't mean that what is happening in Gaza is justified. And the entire point of Dr. Moses' 500-page book is that it doesn't matter what you call it. By litigating out of the charge of genocide, governments, including my own, continue to do it, fund it,

and be complicit in it. So I hope that people, all of us, walk away with context and confidence about historic and current crimes of atrocity. Putting this episode out and shining a light on atrocity crimes has been a two-hour call for a ceasefire. And I made it for the people who need to know that their suffering matters and also for the people who needed to hear logic and history the most and are less plugged into an echo chamber or movement or who want to understand the passion behind the protests.

as well as the underlying fear and hate that tends to spark genocides. The information on generational trauma is a call to understand the origins of war. And given that Dr. Moses outlines very starkly that humanitarian laws are often totally ignored or they're litigated out of, he advocates looking at causes and effects to try to figure out the

prevention of crimes of atrocity. This is a horrible time. The answer to what is going on is not anti-Semitism or Islamophobia. Keep yourself informed, advocate for what you believe, try to understand why some people are apathetic or ambivalent and share knowledge that makes a difference. What students have been doing on college campuses and people

people protesting at the Met Gala and calling attention to what's happening, I think is putting pressure on governments. And I say, keep up the great nonviolent protests. And most of all, please be kind to each other, ask each other questions, learn of each other's perspectives. Thank you so much, Dr. Dirk Moses, for the time you spent with us and the research you continue to do. Again, his book titled The Problems of Genocide is linked in the show notes. We'll also link his social media handles so you can follow him and

other episodes that you might be interested in will be linked in the show notes. We're at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Allie Ward with just one L on both. We have shorter kid-friendly cuts of classic episodes and those are called Smologies and are available for free at allieward.com slash smologies.

Erin Talbert admins Theology's podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer. Susan Hale is managing director. Kelly R. Dwyer makes our website and can make yours. And our lead editor, and in this episode, also a producer and contributed a ton, a ton of excellent research, is editor and impassioned

empath Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Jake Chafee and Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media also contributed to editing of this episode as Mercedes is out today with COVID. We're wishing her quick healing with that. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this week it's that while I am working on this, I have been really sick. You probably can hear it. Sorry about that. My immune system is trashed.

And in the middle of recording a lot of this voiceover, I had to stop and aggressively suck on a cough drop. And the cough drop rapper had these encouraging slogans like, you got this and conquer today and impress yourself today. And I was like, cough drop, I don't got this, but thank you. I'm trying to get this.

We all are. Also, whenever you're needing a cough drop and your cough drop is like, keep going. It's like, has hustle culture gone too far? Either way, my cough is the least of problems on earth. Anyway, as long as we're at the end here and you've stuck around this long and I just really want everyone to know.

I see them. I understand how much pain and injustice and fear and trauma is out there. And I want you to ask each other questions and research things, stand up for each other and be good to each other. Because at our hearts, we're all just a bunch of babies who are scared, at least in my opinion. Okay, bye-bye. Thanks for being here.

Was it easy leaving the group chat when the bubbles turned green and every message was Cam likes this and Claire dislikes that? Oh yes, yes it was because I get enough overreacting at home. Like liking messaging again with WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone.

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