I, too, think that the term genocide can be overused, but there is one very good point that Thiago brought up but has not been fully debated.
At 8:54 PM +0800 6/2/03, Grant Lee replied to Thiago:
>>It sounds to me as if you are trying to define genocide such that
>>it is the crime that Hitler committed,
>
>Not at all, I think there are other examples, but I also think all
>of those would also be questioned by others on this list. I keep
>coming back to the Third Reich because that is the prime, agreed
>example.
What does it mean to use the Third Reich as the yardstick to measure if any given mass murder or mass death fits the definition of genocide? Alex Callinicos writes:
***** The Yale Journal of Criticism 14.2 (2001) 385-414 Plumbing the Depths: Marxism and the Holocaust Alex Callinicos
...Ideology and Genocide
The development of research into the Holocaust over the past few years has, in my view, definitively settled the long-running debate among historians of the Third Reich between "functionalists' and "intentionalists." 67 The extermination of the Jews, rather than emerging fully formed from Hitler's long-term plans, was a piecemeal process driven to a large extent, "from below," by initiatives from rival power-centres within the highly fragmented Nazi bureaucracy. To say this is not to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust. His notorious "prophecy" to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939--"if international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"--was frequently cited by both Hitler and his subordinates as they sought to fulfil his prediction. 68 But recognition of Hitler's role is not inconsistent with an analysis that highlights the complexity of the process that led to Auschwitz. To that extent, the portrayal of the Holocaust by Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen as the outcome of what the latter famously called a "cumulative spiral of radicalization" is correct. 69...
...67. See, for an overview of this debate, see T.W. Mason, "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism," in id., Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class.
68. Kershaw, Hitler, II. 153. See ibid., II. 520-23, on Hitler's awareness of (but refusal explicitly to acknowledge) the extermination of the Jews.
69. H. Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 175; see esp. id., "The Realization of the Unthinkable," in ibid., and M. Broszat, "Hitler and the Genesis of the 'Final Solution,'" in H. Koch, ed., Aspects of the Third Reich (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1985)....
[The full text of the article is available on-line at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/yale_journal_of_criticism/v014/14.2callinicos.html> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] *****
If the Holocaust, too, was a "cumulative spiral of radicalization," a "piecemeal process driven to a large extent, 'from below,' by initiatives from rival power-centres within the highly fragmented Nazi bureaucracy," perhaps it's time to revise the common sense understanding of the term genocide.
At 4:12 PM +0800 6/5/03, Grant Lee wrote:
>If the annihilation of culture, as terrible as it is, is defined as
>genocide, then I think we tend towards a situation whereby the ---
>always traumatic --- transition from pre-modern to modern societies,
>everywhere, always included an element of "genocide".
It's important to recognize that primitive accumulation entailed mass murders and mass deaths. It's not so important whether or not you call them genocides. -- Yoshie
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