Political Genocide Research Articles

Геноцид армян как преступление, нарушающее нормы международного права (историко-правовой аспект)

The purpose of the study is to substantiate the fact that political genocide is one of the most serious crimes throughout the entire path of human development. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve the following task – to present and analyze the stages and manifestations of the policy of cultural genocide carried out by the Young Turks in Western Armenia and other Armenian-populated areas of the Ottoman Empire, and then by the Kemals in the Republic of Armenia.

Britain, Iraq, and the Politics of Genocide: The 1963 Ba’ath Government Campaign Against the Kurds

ABSTRACT The Kurds of Iraq were the victims of a claimed genocide during the rule of the Ba’ath regime in Iraq in 1963. The Iraqi Ba’ath Party first came to power in February of 1963 and was ousted in November of that year; between June and October, it conducted military offensives against the Kurdish minority in Iraq in the name of destroying the Kurdish autonomy movement, then spearheaded by the nationalist Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). No estimated numbers exist on how many people were killed in that period, but an array of international and other reports, presented in this research, concurrently stated that the Iraqi government’s mass violence against the Kurds amounted to genocide. These included private recognition by the relevant UK diplomats and officials. This article examines the foreign policy of the UK in relation to that reported genocide. It explores how the Cold War, regional interests, and a long-held aversion to Kurdish desires for self-rule led Britain not only to overlook the mass violence perpetrated by the Ba’ath government against Iraq’s Kurdish minority in 1963 but also to support the regime. This policy was adopted in the face of credible information available to British officials reporting the Iraqi actions as a genocide. Britain continued to take the public position that the Kurdish issue in Iraq was an internal Iraqi matter while simultaneously seeking to foster good relations with the Ba’ath government by providing it with arms and diplomatic protection and seeking to undermine the Kurdish autonomy movement. Thus, a case study in the politics of genocide and how politics determines the response to these is investigated.

РОСІЙСЬКА ПОЛІТИКА ГЕНОЦИДУ: ОБ’ЄКТИ, ІНТЕРЕСИ, СТРАТЕГІЯ

The article deals with the analysis of Russia’s politics towards other nations, which can be classified as genocide politics. A consistent and purposeful strategy is being followed to capture the territorial, resource and cultural heritage of Veliky Novgorod and Ukraine. In both cases, actions, which were brought to the autochthonous population, was classified as genocide by UN documents. These actions were occurred more than once and were carried out against the Slovenes in the XV-XVII centuries, and against the Ukrainians — in the XVI-XXI. The purpose of Russia is to enhance its geopolitical and civilizational status, by means of violence and appropriation, by objects — of any ethnic group, which hinder its imperial ambitions. The scientific search was conducted by the methods of historical reconstruction, political analysis and demographic approaches. The historical reconstruction avoids the one-sided, distorted interpretation of the events of the past, and uses all existing completeness of actual material to restore the true course of events. The methods of political analysis relate, first of all, to the definition of the role and importance of administrative decisions in determining the strategic priorities of state development. Demographic approaches allow us to see the historical dynamics of changes in the quantity of a particular ethnic group, including the possibility of detecting negative fluctuating factors in this process. It has been demonstrated that the ethno-cultural community, known as the «Russian people», fulfil the criteria that Lev Gumilev proposed to define as «bizarre ethnicities» that parasitize on someone else’s resource — both human and natural. That is why the fate of the conquered land and its inhabitants-autochthonous interests them only from the consumer point of view. The negative consequences for the subjugated side are obvious: humanity is doomed to extinction or either depreciation, and the natural environment to systematic degradation and irreversible changes. It is easy to be convinced by remembering the unhappy history — not life, but animal life — hundreds of people in Russia, their disapperance and extinction, and the acquisition — by those, who survive — humiliating status of «small» nations of Siberia, the Far East and the North. However, the invader himself is defeated in the strategic perspective, because constant parasitism discourage any stimulus for his own socio-economic evolution. It is summarized that the strategic priority in Moscow’s politics towards the true creators and heirs of the heritage of ancient Russia was and will always be the practice of genocide — the systematic and consistent destruction of Slovenes and Ukrainians. These actions were performed to capture the territorial, resource and cultural achievements of these nations with their complete destruction or degradation (of surviving remains), elimination of their identities. These actions are completely fall under the description of the genocide definiton in UN documents as actions which are intended to destroy a particular ethnic group. The current hybrid war, implemented by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, is a manifestation and continuation of its centuries-old strategy against Ukrainian nation in order to deprive them of their physical and civilizational existence.

РОСІЙСЬКА ПОЛІТИКА ГЕНОЦИДУ: ОБ’ЄКТИ, ІНТЕРЕСИ, СТРАТЕГІЯ

The article deals with the analysis of Russia’s politics towards other nations, which can be classified as genocide politics. A consistent and purposeful strategy is being followed to capture the territorial, resource and cultural heritage of Veliky Novgorod and Ukraine. In both cases, actions, which were brought to the autochthonous population, was classified as genocide by UN documents. These actions were occurred more than once and were carried out against the Slovenes in the XV-XVII centuries, and against the Ukrainians — in the XVI-XXI. The purpose of Russia is to enhance its geopolitical and civilizational status, by means of violence and appropriation, by objects — of any ethnic group, which hinder its imperial ambitions. The scientific search was conducted by the methods of historical reconstruction, political analysis and demographic approaches. The historical reconstruction avoids the one-sided, distorted interpretation of the events of the past, and uses all existing completeness of actual material to restore the true course of events. The methods of political analysis relate, first of all, to the definition of the role and importance of administrative decisions in determining the strategic priorities of state development. Demographic approaches allow us to see the historical dynamics of changes in the quantity of a particular ethnic group, including the possibility of detecting negative fluctuating factors in this process. It has been demonstrated that the ethno-cultural community, known as the «Russian people», fulfil the criteria that Lev Gumilev proposed to define as «bizarre ethnicities» that parasitize on someone else’s resource — both human and natural. That is why the fate of the conquered land and its inhabitants-autochthonous interests them only from the consumer point of view. The negative consequences for the subjugated side are obvious: humanity is doomed to extinction or either depreciation, and the natural environment to systematic degradation and irreversible changes. It is easy to be convinced by remembering the unhappy history — not life, but animal life — hundreds of people in Russia, their disapperance and extinction, and the acquisition — by those, who survive — humiliating status of «small» nations of Siberia, the Far East and the North. However, the invader himself is defeated in the strategic perspective, because constant parasitism discourage any stimulus for his own socio-economic evolution. It is summarized that the strategic priority in Moscow’s politics towards the true creators and heirs of the heritage of ancient Russia was and will always be the practice of genocide — the systematic and consistent destruction of Slovenes and Ukrainians. These actions were performed to capture the territorial, resource and cultural achievements of these nations with their complete destruction or degradation (of surviving remains), elimination of their identities. These actions are completely fall under the description of the genocide definiton in UN documents as actions which are intended to destroy a particular ethnic group. The current hybrid war, implemented by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, is a manifestation and continuation of its centuries-old strategy against Ukrainian nation in order to deprive them of their physical and civilizational existence.

Speaking for the dead: the memorial politics of genocide in Namibia and Germany

This paper discusses the politics of the material commemoration of mass crime, with a focus on the Ovaherero and Nama descendants of the victims of a 1904–1908 mass ethnic killing in German Southwest Africa. My approach to monuments emphasises their place as artefacts that mark changes of regime after war or revolution, and as focal points of resistance to state regimes of commemoration. Tracing the material forms of memorialisation in Germany reveals the significance of both a ‘remembrance culture’ of the Holocaust and, at the same time, resistance to recognition of the Ovaherero/Nama genocide. In Namibia, the success of the Ovaherero/Nama activist campaign in Germany prompted the government to shift positions and take up the cause of genocide remembrance, asking Germany to officially recognise that its actions constituted genocide, to issue a formal apology and to pay reparations. By framing the mass violence of imperial Germany in terms of its enduring legacy in heritage, Ovaherero and Nama activists and their supporters were able to cross into different geographies of commemoration and bring distant wrongs, without living witnesses, into the present.

Book Review: The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary Vol. I-II. Third Revised and Updated Edition

Book Review: The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary Vol. I-II. Third Revised and Updated Edition

Existential Angst and Meaning Making in Narratives of Lithuanian Survivors of Soviet Political Deportations

Experiences related to forced deportations of ethnic Lithuanians as part of Stalin’s political genocide were explored in the narratives of six survivors. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis was chosen for its idiographic and interpretive focus on the meanings and individual sense-making of lived experiences. Semistructured interviews were conducted, and the data were analyzed for emergent superordinate themes and subthemes. The results revealed three superordinate themes, which reflect three stages of the participants’ experience of Soviet political persecutions: the Existential Shock of Arrest and Deportation, the Angst of Survival and Identity Negotiation during the Exile, and Rebuilding Life and Seeking Meaning after Amnesty. Subthemes highlighted various dimensions of the effects of political repressions as well as coping mechanisms employed by the survivors. Additionally, the results examined how the participants made meaning of their experiences and explored their perceptions of long-term consequences of trauma associated with political repressions. The article provides an existential and liberation/postcolonial theoretical framework for understanding political violence and concludes with implications for clinical practices with survivors of political persecutions perpetuated against ethnic groups around the world.

«ПОДОЛАННЯ МИНУЛОГО» В КРАЇНАХ ЦЕНТРАЛЬНО-СХІДНОЇ ЄВРОПИ: ОСНОВНІ ТЕНДЕНЦІЇ

Transformation of memory in post-bipolar world inevitably led to the revival and search (creation) of new individual and collective memory, to the aggravation of attention the memories of witnesses tragedies of the twentieth 143 century – the Holocaust, the Stalinist repressions other ethnic and political genocide. Every country has its own system of «overcoming the past». The politics of memory is one of the important factor in this complicated area of creating of new relationships, which has features in Central and Eastern Europe.

Review Article: The Saddest History Ever Written: On Randolph L. Braham’s "The Geographical Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary" (2013)

Only in 1989, after forty-five years of Soviet domination, could the Holocaust in Hungary begin to be discussed openly and honestly. One scholar in particular, the author – editor of this mammoth geographical encyclopedia, Randolph L. Braham, has devoted his life and career to uncovering the truth about what happened within the borders of Hungary and the annexed territories. Since 1961 he has written or edited, co-authored or co-edited more than fifty books on the Holocaust. The masterful two-volume Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (1994) appeared to be his definitive statement. But now, with a team of Hungarian Holocaust scholars and journalists, he uncovers, with maps and photos, how the Holocaust was implemented within each and every city, town, and village of every one of the forty-one counties in wartime Hungary.

Mujeres víctimas del genocidio contra la unión patriótica: ¿es posible su reparación integral?

The main objective of the research was to identify elements that would allow to propose repair criteria with a gender perspective for women victims of the genocide against the Patriotic Union. for that, an analisis was realized about the concept of political genocide, the damages caused to victims were identified and integral reparation mechanisms were proposed. Methodologically, the theoretical basis was based through gender and human rights. The qualitative paradigm and the method of collective case study was used. The data collection instruments used were: focus groups, bibliographic records and interviews. In the results several facts victimized women, mainly homicide and forced disappearance became evident. The damages identified were of tangible and intangible nature, besides others who were part of a special category because of its importance. The events should be categorized under the category of political genocide although not recognize international standards and Colombia has done post-case manner. With respect to compensation, women suffered consequences affecting them their particular condition of being a woman, so it should be repaired with concrete affirmative action that guarantees their full compensation.

Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine, by Christian Ingrao

Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine, by Christian Ingrao. London, Polity, 2013. ix, 432 pp. 25.00 [pounds sterling] (cloth). Christian Ingrao's book on the Security Service's (SD) intellectual elite is welcome addition to the corpus of research on the SS and the politics of genocide that has grown so massively over the past two decades. Ingrao, author of study of the Brigade Dirlewanger, is expert in the field and he sets out to olfer nothing less than a decisive reinterpretation of Nazi practices (p. viii). Methodologically, he approaches his subject by identifying group of some eighty men whose collective biography he investigates--not as cradle-to-grave narrative but with twofold research question of (a) which experiences and influences were instrumental in making group of young men with above-average education prone to National Socialism; and (b) how the ensuing convictions and beliefs translated into genocidal action. Ingrao proceeds chronologically, starting with World War I as the pivotal childhood event of his sample, and ending with the post-1945 criminal prosecution of his protagonists. Along the way, he makes number of significant observations, some of them surprising, such as the result of his in-depth reading of the SD officers' extensive CVs. Here, he notes, World War I played only marginal role and defeat did not figure at all. The war's impact, however, would feed into mindset that conceived of Germany as threatened by world of enemies. Such notions were fostered by the Weimar Republic's volkische movement with its academic strongholds. That German students were among the most vociferously right-wing groups is well-known and Ingrao can show how universities developed into clusters for future SD officers, catalyzed ideological radicalization and became hubs of career networks. After 1933-34, SS and SD expanded rapidly and Ingrao's protagonists embarked on impressive careers. Among these were Reinhard Hohn, Otto Ohlendorf, and Franz Six who, as the author suggests, was not the scholarly usurper he has been frequently made to be but an alluring young professor, with brilliant career ahead of him (p. 19). War did not imply break in these men's careers. Ingrao shows how the SD officers perceived the Osteinsatz--their service as commanders in the infamous Einsatzgruppen--as opportunity for sociobiological re-establishment (pp. 62, 128) of Gentian rule in Europe, realizing their millenarian aspirations. Arguing that the SD officers' willingness to engage in genocide was the product of fluid (p. 136) ensemble of beliefs and emotions, Ingrao skirts old-school intentionalism and insists that the motives for becoming mass murderers were dynamic and varied significantly. So did their efforts to escape prosecution or at least capital punishment when they were tried first by the Allies, then by German courts: while Six cast himself as the pure academic Ohlendorf strove for autobiographical consistency during his long spell at Nuremberg, even if that would cost his life. More influential was his construction of exculpating narratives for both the SD and Gennany, along with the intricate coordination between the defendants and witnesses, which Ingrao ably deconstructs. Not everything the author has on offer is all that new, and many of his findings support or supplement rather than correct existing research, notably Michael Wildt's comprehensive study. …

Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile by Jean M. Langford (review)

Jean M. Langford, Consoling Ghosts: Stories of Medicine and Mourning from Southeast Asians in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 304 pp.Consoling Ghosts is a beautifully written and sensitively portrayed conversation not just about the conflict in beliefs between Southeast Asian emigrants (Khmer, Lao, Hmong, and Kmhmu) and the American institutions with which they must necessarily interact, but one that gradually builds and circles through many areas of understanding and subjectivity. Langford begins with the initial premise that she is not concerned with refugees or immigrants, but instead emigrants, in order to minimize initial assumptions by the reader as to the nature of these emigrants' experience. Centering on the common belief that the spirits of the dead are real and that daily life is engagement with the dead as much as with the living, she goes on to question many fundamental presumptions of psychology, medicine, and even anthropology. Assuming that spirits are real and a part of daily life for the emigrants brings into question several ethical and philosophical assumptions of Western practitioners, such as the idea that patient autonomy trumps family wishes regarding a patient's informed awareness of dying, and the nature of trauma therapy. Southeast Asia-long recognized as a place where ethnicity only carries analysis so far, where ethnic allegiances are strategic and situational, and where commonalities in beliefs and sensibilities bridge political and religious divisions-once again becomes the backdrop for an appreciation of regional similarities. Langford's narrators present the reader with stories that are painful, horrifying, and also inspiring and baffling. Yet, she skips from a Lao narrator to one that is Khmer without making an effort to draw boundaries, other than to identify the narrator. This is intentional, as she describes, recognizing that although this switch may be confusing, it is appropriate, as it allows for the recognition of certain commonalities of world perspective that underlie these cultures and that stand in contrast to those of mainstream American society. In addition, the emigrants from Southeast Asia also share the experience of years of devastating warfare and political genocide (in many ways supported and encouraged by their new hosts), and the consequent minoritization and poverty inherent to living in a marginal position in the US. The emigrants confront the biopolitics surrounding the everyday occurrences of death and dying in hospitals, through hospice, or in the funeral industry, which are organized to value a certain kind of dying and death, often opposed to those with which the Southeast Asian emigrants are accustomed. The same issues have occurred with Vietnamese immigrants, and the author alludes to this in examples. Yet, this is not the prosaic examination of a simple contrast, because Langford's own moments of autobiographical experience, carefully laced throughout the work, suggest a more complex and nuanced comparison. Nor are the narrators speaking with one voice; rather, they present varying levels of skepticism and explanation. Furthermore, deaths of loved ones in the US, under the auspices of an institutionalized death industry, are often as traumatic as the deaths from war and genocide in Southeast Asia. Thus, the violence that emigrants experience is not only the violence of war, but also the violence of marginalization and minoritization. The issues are as complex and confusing as dying itself-a point Langford makes strongly-despite American efforts to sanitize and organize.As part of their experience as emigrants, Southeast Asians confront various dislocations-geographical and spiritual-and are forced to wrestle with the consequences in their relations with each other and with the dead. The relationship of trauma to a concept of time and healing becomes central. From the standard US perspective, the healing of trauma, parallel to the exorcism of ghosts, requires going back in time and witnessing the trauma in order to be released from it. …

Mississippi Mahjar : Lebanese Immigration to the Mississippi Delta

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As anyone who has studied history of South knows, racial hostility was ubiquitous across Mississippi Delta throughout hundred years following Civil War. But contrary to dominant narrative, conflict there was not purely limited to relationships between blacks and whites. As Haseeb George Abraham, a Lebanese peddler who immigrated to Mississippi Delta in 1885, discovered, those who came to Delta from elsewhere had to learn customs of region before they were accepted into social culture there. Gregory Thomas of Vicksburg describes how his great-grandfather traveled across region peddling his wares, once unintentionally asking a lady on a Delta plantation to sleep with him, instead of asking if she could provide shelter for night. Knowing little English, he soon found himself upon back of a horse with a noose around his neck, prepared for his hanging. Only when another Lebanese man came along and inquired as to what had happened was mistake made clear and Abraham's life spared. (1) Haseeb Abraham's experience provided him a crash course in ways of Delta. Generally, itinerant peddling gave immigrants opportunity to gradually learn and adapt to prevailing social customs of South, including its stringent social codes and harsh judicial practices. Interactions with rural farmers and, occasionally, townsfolk gave peddlers chance to view culture as somewhat passive observers in sense that they were perpetually passing through. MOVING TO THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA Between 1880s and end of World War I, a combination of famines, epidemics, extreme poverty, and religious and political genocide led to more than 100,000 deaths in Mount Lebanon region of Ottoman Empire-controlled Syria. During that same period, over 100,000 Lebanese residents of predominantly Christian region participated in a mass migration that scattered them across globe to places such as Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and United States. While most of these Lebanese citizens intended to emigrate only until conditions at home had improved, many eventually realized that life of an emigrant in United States was preferable to that on what was commonly known as the Mountain. Ironically, many Lebanese fleeing hardship and oppression found themselves in Mississippi, settling in caste-based, Jim Crow Delta, where they were considered neither black nor white. These Lebanese immigrants--mostly male--found work peddling wares to blacks and whites across Delta, forming close economic bonds in and with black communities and hoping one day to assimilate into economically and socially dominant white community--all while retaining vital elements of their own cultural heritage. (2) For decades, observers from within and beyond mostly rural Mississippi Delta have chiefly defined region as a black/white dichotomy that consisted primarily of planter-class and poor whites, and slaves-turned-sharecroppers-turned-impoverished blacks. William Alexander Percy furthered that notion in his 1941 autobiography Lanterns on Levee: [T]he cloth of Delta population--as of whole South--is built of three dissimilar threads and only three. First were old slave holders, landed gentry, governing class; though they have gone, they were not sterile; they have their descendants, whose evaluation of life approximates theirs. Second were poor whites, who owned no slaves, whose manual labor lost its dignity from being in competition with slave labor, who worked their small unproductive holding ignored by gentry, despised by slaves. Third were Negroes. (3) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The reality, however, is that region has long been peopled with inhabitants as diverse and distinctive as its soil is fertile. …

Writing with an Ear to the Ground: The Armenian Genocide's "Stubborn Murmur"

Writing with an Ear to the Ground: The Armenian Genocide's "Stubborn Murmur"

Book review: The Politics of Genocide, by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson The Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press: New York, 2010, 159 pp: 9781583672129, US$12.95 (pbk) Herman and Peterson's book fundamentally critiques 'the basic outline of the politics of genocick' in contemporary times. By employing three ingenious frameworks ('constructive', 'nefarious' and 'benign') for disentangling the politics of genocide, the volume brilliantly captures the sheer hypocrisy of 'genocide-oriented intellectuals and media' and the cruelties of Western humanitarian interventions that evidently reflect a 'huge political bias' in favour of the USA and other imperialist countries. Unsurprisingly, the intensity of the crimes and the worth of the victim's life are decided by a single criterion: that of 'who is responsible for carrying them out' (p. 16). The crimes and mass killings committed by the USA and other imperialist powers are always 'constructive', therefore the 'victims are unworthy' and this cannot thus be called 'ethnic cleansing' or 'genocide'. However, mass murders carried out by US allies and clients are 'benign'. Finally, brutalities carried out by enemies of the USA are 'nefarious', and therefore victims deserve immediate attention and rigorous punishment for the perpetrators. Herman and Peterson's analysis painstakingly reveals the role of media pundits, human rights intellectuals, international NGOs and their criminal silence over US-supported mass killings in various parts of the world. Liberal academic and media treatment of human rights violations, and their laments over 'crimes against humanity', are always selective. Their explanations do not touch any of the mass killings perpetrated by the USA, and 'whenever the United States colludes in a genocidal process', they pretend that 'U.S. guilt is at worst that of remaining a mere bystander, but never that of an accomplice, let alone a perpetrator' (p. 64). Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize winning (2003) book 'A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is a classic example in this regard. The section 'Constructive Genocides' includes various cases of mass murders, like the thirteen years (1992-2003) of economic sanctions that killed a million people, mainly children and women, and the occupation and destruction of Iraq, which killed a million and displaced around 5 million, by Anglo-American forces in 2003. The economic sanctions imposed upon Iraq destroyed that country's social fabric, and its impact was genocidal. Massive bombings and destruction and the looting of archaeological heritage were serious crimes, but still 'it is the Iraqis who owe the United States a debt' (p. 37). For the Western establishment, these 'sanctions of mass destructions' were constructive, and therefore the victims were unworthy. The authors point out that in Iraq's case, media references to 'genocide' numbere eighty, but in 'Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur, four Nefarious cases, the usage ran to 481, 323, 3, 199, and 1,172 respectively' (p. 33). The book discusses the Western 'politics of framing' false questions in the context of various political conflicts and violence. The political conflicts in Darfur have been treated as 'nefarious'. Here, 'genocide' was used ninety times, and was successfully racialised as an 'ethnic cleansing' of Black Africans by Arab Muslim rulers. The death toll was twenty times more violent than in the Democratic Republic of Congo; but for the West it was a benign bloodbath because it had the complete the support of the USA, France, and Britain. Conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995) and Kosovo (1998-1999) were labelled as 'Serb evil and violence', and portrayed as the ethnic cleansing, and massacre of Bosnian Muslims, Croatians, and Kosovo Albanians. The 'Srebrenica massacre' (July 1995) got huge attention in the Western media and political circles, and was 'cited heavily and repeated endlessly, and with great indignation, to demonstrate that genocide actually had taken place in Bosnia' (p. …

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson: Consistent critics of American 'politics of genocide'

Argumentation of the two distinguished American authors E. Herman and D. Petersen is analyzed in the text with reference to the American duplicity regarding the politics of human rights protection, so-called 'humanitarian interventions' and the question of qualifying war events and crimes as 'genocide'. Even in 1973 Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman designed a 'typology of bloodshed', based on interests of the Government of USA. Therefore, they point out the difference between 'good and bad bloodsheds', where the former should be ignored and the latter judged in maximal extent. The following is ranked among the 'good bloodsheds': a) constructive, which are made by the USA or which contribute to their direct and strategic interests, and b) benign, which are made by American allies and clients. Chomsky and Herman included among bad bloodsheds the following: c) criminal, made by the states that are opposed to the USA, and d) mythological bloodsheds, as a subvariety of criminal bloodshed, to which a mass publicity is given in media and public in general, regardless the relevant evidence that they had happened at all. On basis of applied methods for quantitative analysis of text contents in the most important American written media and on comparative method, with regard to the typology of bloodshed made by N. Chomsky and E. Herman even in 1973, almost four decades later Herman and Peterson have made a classification of crimes performed throughout the world, which at the same time has the role of verificatory research of Chomsky-Herman typology. Their research shows existence of a significant prejudice regarding qualifying different events as 'genocide', which is conditioned by the American interests and in full extent confirms the Chomsky-Herman typology, while Herman and Peterson find in their research that the number of such cases has been increased considerably in the meantime. Therefore, in the case of the crime that was performed in Kongo, it was required more than 317 thousand of dead Kongos to appear in the American mainstream media that the 'genocide' is in question, while at the same time it was required 12 killed Albanians from Kosovo to appear the qualification of 'genocide'. Their finding on racism in qualifications is based on this and other facts put in proportion: it never has happened that ''guardians' of the international justice' managed to find evidences for a single crime made by 'great white northern powers, which exceeds the threshold of tolerance'. In other words, in such a situation it never has happened that bloodshed was judged as genocide. A conclusion is made on connection of high American officials with media from the behavior of media, which in that way create propaganda and creation of such public opinion that support the course of the official American politics uncritically, without any doubts regarding the authenticity of given qualification of certain event.

Staging a Christopher Columbus Play in a Culture of Illusion: Public Pedagogy in a Theatre of Genocide

In the foreword to The Politics of Genocide, political theorist Noam Chomsky writes that denial of the American Indian holocaust is a potent force in the United States. He argues that ‘the most unambiguous cases of genocide’ are often ‘acknowledged by the perpetrators, and passed over as insignificant or even denied in retrospect by the beneficiaries, right to the present’. That is very true in the United States, where the author of this article discovers that few of his college students know much, if anything, about the capacious genocide of North American Indians. In this article, Brian McKenna explores the power of aesthetic theory and praxis to help overcome the rigid psychological defenses of besieged students. He carefully informs students about the genocide spawned by Columbus and the Spanish, and then draws connections between that history and the history of US Indian genocide and imperialism, up to the present day in Iraq and around the globe. The article presents a five-part exercise, refined over seven years, that shows how McKenna lets the ‘truth’ dazzle gradually and then thunder mightily in revealing students to themselves. He requires students to imagine themselves as high school teachers where they must produce the written outlines of a play that is based, in part, on the truths of the Spanish genocide as depicted by America's first de facto cultural anthropologist, Father Bartolomé de las Casas. The ultimate aims of the exercise are threefold: (1) Will students, in the politically charged setting of a high school, construct a Theatre of Genocide about the Arawak Indians and the Spanish? (2) Will students draw the educational links between the Spanish and the theatres of war and genocide associated with the United States? And (3) How will students grapple with the pedagogical relationships between knowledge and power; censorship and self-censorship; truth and art? The article also asks, ‘Who controls the play curriculum? How can critical public pedagogues challenge the ubiquity of high school productions such as Oklahoma! and Hello, Dolly! to create forms of drama that speak directly to the issues of the day?

Genocide Denial with a Vengeance: Old and New Imperial Norms

Perhaps the most shattering lesson from [the] powerful inquiry [of Edward S. Herman and David Peterson in The Politics of Genocide] is that the end of the Cold War opened the way to an era of virtual Holocaust denial. As the authors put it, more temperately, "During the past several decades, the word 'genocide' has increased in frequency of use and recklessness of application, so much so that the crime of the 20th Century for which the term originally was coined often appears debased." Current usage, they show, is an insult to the memory of victims of the NazisThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Stalin's terror of 1937-1938: political genocide in the USSR

Stalin's terror of 1937-1938: political genocide in the USSR

Justice delayed or too late for justice? The Khmer Rouge Tribunal and the Cambodian “genocide” 1975–79

The Khmer Rouge under their leader Saloth Sar (“Pol Pot”) were in power in Cambodia between April 1975 and January 1979.1 They came into control of the country after a long and brutal civil war2 an...