[lbo-talk] decentralised genocides

Grant Lee grantlee at iinet.net.au
Sat Jun 7 00:16:10 PDT 2003


Hi Thiago,


> I really cannot see what is gained by narrowing the definition of genocide
> as you have done. Now the chickens come home to roost: you end up having
to
> come up with this humungous red herring that genocides need to be
centrally
> controlled. That's rubbish, as a casual review of the history of pogroms
> indicates pretty clearly. You might say that those were not genocides...

I don't think it is a red herring. I refer you to Justin's comments on the pogroms. Obviously, any simultaneous occurrence of both state-sponsored and spontaneous racist killings does not mean that they were one and the same thing.


> well, but what do you call it when the people's crusade casually wipes out
> almost the entire Jewish population of France? I don't like Norman Cohn's
> writing on millenarian movements all that much, but he definitely has a
> point in showing that the kind of totalizing violence the Nazis perfected
> has very ancient roots.

Speaking of red herrings ... we are talking about the 11th Century. So it was a wave of christian religious fanaticism --- not a modern, racist/antisemitic, virtually secular phenomenon --- probably subconciously bolstered by an interest in loot. It's always tempting to see "ancient roots" in superficially similar events. The only real similarities here being mass murder and looting.


> And the history of the Americas is full of tribes
> and whole culture groups that were wiped out without anyone signing off on
> them, without a masterplan. Call it "criminally negligent genocide" if you
> like, but not calling it genocide is like saying that someone who
> accidentally (half-deliberately) mixes arsenic in milk because he could
not
> care less is not a homicide.

Obviously there _were_ instances of systematic, state-sponsored mass murder in modern settler colonies. I have never said otherwise. However, I don't believe we can apply the term genocide to very much of half a millenium of history in the Americas. My understanding is that --- as in Australia --- by far the biggest killers of indigenes in the Americas were newly-arrived diseases from Europe/Africa and associated famines, neither of which needed any assistance from swords, guns, arsenic or infected blankets, because the result would still have been a 90% death rate.


> On the other hand, I would strongly object to Callinico's argument, which
to
> my ears sounds like a leftwing version of Goldhagen, but that's another
> matter entirely.

I agree completely on that point.

regards,

Grant.



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