Genocide Provocation? The Case of the Ottoman Armenians and the Rwandan Tutsis

Abstract

Academic and media interest in the study of genocide has grown significantly in recent years. The Holocaust is, of course, the most prominent genocide in both academic and popular culture. The fact that scholars and journalists pay attention to acts as horrific as genocide would not seem to be noteworthy or surprising. Yet, as the works of Peter Novick and Raul Hilberg demonstrate, there was comparatively little interest in the study of the Holocaust in the United States in the decades following World War II.1 American Jews did not wish to emphasize the catastrophe that had been inflicted upon European Jews by the Nazis, or accentuate their cultural distinctiveness and vulnerability as a people. The political and historical circumstances that led to the intense interest in the Holocaust in the United States cannot be detailed here;2 instead, this chapter will focus on the value many ethnic groups in the United States have come to place on the status of genocide victimhood in recent years. It is worth recalling Deborah Lipstadt’s arguments about the value of victim status. Lipstadt claims that the world accords moral capital to genocide victims and those who would deny genocide victim status to a group may well deprive the group of a moral and political resource.3 This is, of course, the reason Lipstadt argues so stridently against equating other genocides with the Holocaust and labels them “immoral equivalencies.”4