Buchen, Simon --- "Genocide Perspectives I: Essays in Comparative Genocide, Edited by Colin Tatz" [1997] AUJlHRights 28; (1997) 4(1) Australian Journal of Human Rights 220
Review Article: Genocide Perspectives I:
Essays in Comparative Genocide
edited by Colin Tatz
Simon Buchen[1]
In 1943 a jurist and émigré from Nazi-occupied Poland, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term "genocide". The appellation is a hybrid of the Greek genos (race or tribe) and the Latin cide (killing). The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) described Lemkin's term as "a modern word for an old crime". Indeed, Lemkin's linguistic invention is a remarkable example of how the act of naming can catalyse attention upon what was hitherto an anonymous phenomenon. Once designated by Winston Churchill as "a crime without a name", the concept of genocide has entered into wide usage, particularly within the discourses of historical and journalistic writing. It is common to speak of the "genocide" in Bosnia, Rwanda and East Timor.
The broader discursive application of "genocide" is problematic. The modern notion emerged at international law in the aftermath of the Second World War. Precedent, established in the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials and codified in the Genocide Convention 1948, allowed for the explicit and far-reaching criminalisation of the international crime of genocide -- the commission of specific acts which intend to destroy, wholly or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. However, this process was driven almost entirely by universal reaction to a particular mass murder: the Holocaust.[2] Consequently, the construction of the genocide concept at international law is paradoxical, attempting simultaneously to embrace a specific event and a categorical or typological mode of criminality.
This paradox emphasises the theoretical difficulties involved in a comparative approach to genocide. Several writers would dispute the basic validity of a typology of genocide. When Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel named Auschwitz the "zero point of history", he was suggesting that the Endlösung ("Final Solution") was an absolute reality, defying comparison with other atrocities or even analysis by dispassionate historical writing: "Auschwitz defies imagination and perception; it submits only to memory... Between the dead and the rest of us there exists an abyss that no talent can comprehend."[3] The philosopher Jean-Francios Lyotard articulated a similar concern when he likened Auschwitz to an earthquake that destroys not only lives, buildings and objects, but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly. The possibility of a "quantitative measurement" disappears, yet within the mind of the survivor there persists the impression of a very great seismic force.[4] The implication formed is that outside the impressionistic understanding of the survivor, the reality of a particular genocide is unknowable - an analogy may be located in the "Ding an Sich'"("thing in itself") or noumenal world of Kantian philosophy. An historical, sociological or comparative study of genocide will not illuminate, only distort.
A recent publication by the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Macquarie University, Genocide Perspectives I: Essays in Comparative Genocide, attempts to revise this limiting epistemology. In the introduction the editor-in-chief and Director of the Centre, Professor Tatz, asserts:
Despite the deficiencies of the tools of social science and the humanities, our aim is to analyse and evaluate what constitutes murder, mass murder, atrocity, traumatic and catastrophic events, crimes against humanity, war crimes and, at the end of the scale, genocide. We need to examine the levels and degrees of genocide, perhaps develop a "Richter-scale" type of instrument that takes account of intent, method, intensity.[5]
The comparative perspective will, according to Tatz, excavate the socio-political conditions under which genocide occurs. Furthermore, a comparative study will evaluate the prerequisites for the perpetuation of the crime and locate legal and moral responsibility for genocidal policy and practice.[6] Genocide Perspectives thus promotes discussion towards a more systematic and meaningful conceptualisation of the crime of genocide, emphasising the analysis of "motives for group-specific killings across the ages."[7]
The comparative methodology is pursued indirectly, through the diverse subject matter of the ten essays that comprise the volume. A wide range of atrocities differentiated both chronologically and geographically are discussed: the East Timorese crisis of the last 20 years (Adam Kleemeyer); the destruction of Aborigines in central Australia, 1860-1895 (Richard Kimber); and, the annihilation of tidewater Virginia's indigenous people, the Powhatans, in the early years of the 17th century (Paul Bartrop). A neglected aspect of Nazi genocidal practice, the mass murder of Europe's gypsies (the Porrajmos), is considered by David Young. Ernest Hunter details the fate of Jewish doctors during the Holocaust, analysing the memoirs of survivors from Auschwitz, Warsaw ghetto and Wilno ghetto. The "reintroduction of antisemitism as a `legitimate' ideology of the right" in post-communist Hungary is examined by Vera Ranki. Tamsin Solomon introduces a legal perspective to the collection, commenting upon judicial responses to racial vilification in two recent Canadian cases, R v Keegstra[8] and R v Zundel,[9] and their implications for Australian law. Finally, Genocide Perspectives presents three contributions toward an understanding of the dynamics of genocide and its consequences: Kurt Jonassohn's study of the use of starvation as a `low technology weapon' and its relation to genocide; Zdzislaw Ryn's survey of the psychic and somatic pathologies suffered by Holocaust survivors; and, Colin Tatz's reflection on genocide and the politics of memory.
The eclectic nature of the collection evokes many questions that deserve close attention. However, a detailed evaluation of the merits of each article unfortunately lies beyond the confines of this review. It is worthwhile briefly considering though, whether Tatz's (and the Centre's) ambitious aims are realised. Does Genocide Perspectives improve the inadequate UN definition of genocide, which omits the destruction of political groups and the possibility of "gradations" of atrocity? In other words, are the crimes of murder, mass murder, atrocity, crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide meaningfully and systematically differentiated? Or, does this study merely engage in what Michael Berenbaum denoted as the "calculus of calamity"?[10]
Two criticisms are relevant here. First, Genocide Perspectives lacks any methodological or theoretical survey of the various definitions and conceptualisations of genocide proposed by the authors. Almost all of the contributors, either explicitly or implicitly, proceed from a particular notion of genocide. At times these notions diverge quite sharply. For instance, the broad definition provided by Adam Kleemeyer ("the deliberate, sustained and systematic attempt to eliminate a group - whether that group be national, cultural, ethnic, racial, religious or political"[11]) contrasts the more restrictive definition adopted by Paul Bartrop, (which requires the intent of "physical destruction" of a people.[12]) This conceptual discrepancy would seem to explain the divergent conclusions reached by the authors. Kleemeyer identifies two decades of genocide in East Timor, while Bartrop describes the fate of the Powhatans as `destruction without genocide'. Rather than appreciating a "Richter-scale" of genocide, the reader is left with the impression of a diversity of scales contingent upon the personal preference of the authors.
Second, this reviewer would contend that the more noteworthy moments of the collection proceed from the immersion of certain authors within particular genocides. If we return to the earlier suggestions that genocidal reality falls outside historical experience and defies ordinary description, then one might query whether a comparative approach really clarifies the meaning of "genocide". Tatz claims there "can only be interdependence, not independence, in this field, something most Holocaust scholars now concede."[13] Yet, the quest for "interdependence" involves the risk of decontextualising complex historical phenomena in favour of more or less arbitrary criteria. Historians have often questioned the social scientist's will to categorisation and typological arrangement.
Nevertheless, Michael Marrus has noted that inhibitions to dispassionate historical discussion of events like the Holocaust are gradually losing force.[14] It may well be that the formulation of a comparative perspective is an important and inevitable part of this process. For this reason, Genocide Perspectives is worth contemplation. This compilation of essays proposes an interesting response to Yehuda Bauer's dilemma:
How then do we avoid mystification without destroying the mysterious quality that every historical event, and most certainly this one [the Holocaust], possesses?[15]
[1] BA(Hons), LLB (Syd).
[2] LR Beres "Justice and realpolitik: international law and the prevention of genocide" (1988) American Journal of Jurisprudence 123 at 124.
[3] E Wiesel quoted in Marrus M The Holocaust in History (Penguin, Harms. 1989) pp 2-3.
[4] Lyotard J The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1988).
[5] Tatz C "Introducing perspectives" Genocide Perspectives I: Essays in Comparative Genocide, ed Tatz (Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, 1997) pp v-vi.
[6] Ibid p vii.
[7] Ibid p vi.
[8] (1990) 61 Can. Crim. Cases 1.
[10] Quoted by Tatz, Genocide Perspectives, p v, 311.
[11] Kleemeyer, ibid p 1.
[12] Bartrop, ibid pp 97-99.
[13] Tatz, ibid p ix.
[14] Marrus, op cit p 2.
[15] Bauer Y The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (ANU Press, Canberra 1978) p 47.