Deny the real

The "progress" of the twentieth century has been constant along its journey of horrors--from the massacre of the Armenians, to the planned famine in the Ukraine, to the Holocaust, to the killing fields of Cambodia. The enormity of the genocidal horrors of our century is indicated by our almost schizophrenic attitude toward it. We move between attitudes of despair on one hand and denial or avoidancy on the other. These attitudes are actually mirror images of each other. They both seek to deny reality by avoiding any responsibility for the need to understand the phenomenon so that we can avoid repeating it again and again. Our first obligation, therefore, is to face it squarely.

If genocide is the destruction of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, the study of genocide is the attempt to understand this phenomenon, both in its genesis and prevention. Far too great and too grave has the suffering caused by genocide been for it to be ignored. Far too many resources--scientific and other--are spent to destroy rather than to enhance life. The study of genocide can only have one goal--and its very object of investigation demands that it be to preserve and to promote human life. All else would be perverse. Therefore, any scientific effort to study genocide is bound to combine both theory and action--is bound to be praxis; praxis designed to change the conditions that have led to genocide in the past, or could do so in the future. It is, and must be, change-oriented interpretation and theorizing, action-oriented scholarship .

Massive human suffering caused by people is not unique to genocide. In fact, much more suffering and death are and have been inflicted worldwide in ways that technically are not called genocide. Millions may have died from genocide in recent history. But hundreds of millions succumbed as a result of human induced starvation or war. What, then, makes the study of genocide so important, so compelling? What should make genocidal killing a more important object of study than the killing through war or anonymous economic mechanisms--particularly if more lives could potentially be preserved by studying the latter? Clearly, there is no reason why the study and prevention of genocide should have precedence over the study and prevention of other processes that are equally or even more destructive of human lives. Rather, what has emerged may be seen as a division of labor among like-minded scholars holding similar values, nurturing similar hopes, and working with similar intentions: to prevent the destruction of life, to create life-enhancing social conditions.

Scholars have been more concerned with the study of war, poverty, and disease than with the study of genocide. However, since the genocidal destruction of life cannot be clearly dissociated from other but equally destructive processes, any study of genocide must also be informed by and connected to all other efforts to understand and to prevent the mass destruction of human lives. Therefore, a scientific praxis to understand and prevent poverty, disease and war will also directly enhance the understanding and prevention of genocide.

The term "genocide" was coined against the aftermath of World War II, indicating that the study of genocide, as we know it today, is about fifty years old. The motivation to focus specifically on genocide--as opposed to other life-destroying processes--may greatly vary from one individual to another. However, the twentieth century experience with genocide is still too deeply engraved in societal consciousness; the pain of survivors and relatives of victims is still too vivid; the remaining injustice suffered by members of various ethnic groups is still too deep for it not to have had an effect on the scholarly community and some of its practitioners.

To say that the term "genocide" and the effort to study and prevent it is new implies that the phenomenon itself may be recent to human history. In other words, processes that destroy groups on the basis of their religion, race, ethnicity, or nationality may be correlates of modernity and the tremendous social differentiation, that is, the hierarchically and horizontally highly segmented society that characterizes it. By implication, then, genocide would not be expected to occur in societies with little social differentiation.

Indeed, when consulting the historical wisdom on this point, it appears that the first mass killings where genocide might have been involved occurred in societies with sufficient differentiation to be classified as agricultural societies. All previous human history--agricultural societies emerged only about 6,000 years ago--did not seem to know genocide although lives were destroyed in warfare.