On Sun, 7 May 2006 11:17:19 -0400 "Yoshie Furuhashi"
<critical.montages at gmail.com> writes:
> On 5/5/06, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
> > But there is also a problem with the term
> > geneocide that needs to be firmed up.
>
> The term "genocide" is not like the term "H2O," so it's not possible
> to firm it up. It's one of those essentially contested terms -- like
> racism -- whose varied usage necessarily reflects contradictory class
> and other social interests.
I am inclined to think that the term is one of those abused terms like "terrorism" that have been reduced to near meaninglessness through overuse. While in the case of "terrorism," the term was always from the beginning, suspect, in the case of the term "genocide," the term has been rendered meaningless by its use or rather abuse by what Yoshie describes as "contradictory class and other social interests."
In that spirit, I am reminded of the younger and wiser Christopher Hitchens' article, "Wanton Acts of Usage: Terrorism: A cliché in search of a meaning." Harper's Magazine 273 (September 1986):66-70, which as far as I can tell, is not available online. There Hitchens made the case that the very concept of terrorism was in fact a pseudoconcept, lacking a coherent definition that wasn't tendentious.
In that article from twenty years ago, Hitch examined the then new discipline ofterrorism studies. He found that not one of the cold war and anti-Palestinian experts he interviewed could explain what he meant by terrorism. Some of these experts conceded that their discipline was founded on a meaningless concept.
As the Hitch put it back then:
"This is a bit of a disgrace to language as well as politics. . . English was studded with dozens of accurate words from guerrilla to fascist, psychopath to assassin, which described different types of violence precisely and allowed rational argument about their application. "Terrorist", by contrast, was "a convenience word, a junk word, designed to obliterate distinctions. It must be this that recommends it so much to governments with something to hide, to the practitioners of instant journalism, and to shady consultants."
>
> What we can do is to challenge those who use the term to apply it
> consistently, rather than applying it to only large-scale deaths that
> Washington chooses to condemn and refusing to apply it to deaths that
> Washington's or its proxies' actions have caused. E.g., those who
> think Darfur is a genocide ought to apply it to Iraq, too; and those
> who don't think Iraq is a genocide ought not to apply it to Darfur,
> much less Chechnya.
>
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
>
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