Three Genocides

'Never again' rings hollow in the face of international indifference and complicity. But what can we learn from past killing to prevent future genocide?

Video version:

If you like the videos, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. I’m still learning how to do them properly. Any feedback will be gratefully received.

Text version:

This past week the European Court of Human Rights held that Russia had committed human rights abuses on a massive scale in Ukraine, including widespread sexual violence, torture, including strangling and electric shocks, as well as mock executions and amputations. Many of the abuses described in its report are simply horrific.

The UN last year reported that Russia has established a system of torture, starting with special units at the frontlines to abuse captured Ukrainian soldiers, to larger camps behind the frontlines to subject them to systematic and long-term torture. Meanwhile, Russia is dramatically increasing the scale of its drone attacks on Ukrainian cities - attacks which are designed to terrrorise, demoralise and of course kill civilians. Russia's campaign against Ukrainian civilians, and its accompanying rhetoric denying the existence of Ukraine, amounts to genocide, according to several qualified authorities.

In Sudan, there have been innumerable war crimes and atrocities by both sides in the country's civil war, but particularly by the so-called Rapid Support Forces, or RSF. As documented by the ICC, UN and human rights NGOs, the RSF are responsible for several instances of mass killings of non-Arabs, plausibly amounting to genocide, the widespread use of sexual violence including rape and gang rape and enforced sexual slavery, including for girls as young as 12. The RSF is supported, financed and armed by the United Arab Emirates, quite why is not clear to me (reportedly, it’s something to do with acquiring resources), but the UAE is a western ally, as well as a playground for western tourists, celebrities and online influencers, who can be seen in their tiktok feeds sunning themselves and sipping cocktails in rooftop swimming pools in Dubai, including the likes of David Beckham and inevitably the Kardashians. Its role in facilitating genocide is rarely mentioned.

The US, France, Britain and many other supposedly rights-respecting countries continue to sell weapons to the UAE, some of which find their way into the hands of the RSF. Ambassadors of those countries spend significant energy, and win significant career boosts, to sell fighter jets, rifles and artillery that the UAE does not need, but somehow mysteriously still buys.

Those responsible for terrible crimes are getting away with it. Some of them are supported by our own governments. Israeli forces are daily killing children - children - lining up for food, water and medical supplies in Gaza. Meanwhile, the British government this week proscribed as a terrorist organisation not those perpetrating these monstrous crimes, but those who are protesting against them, namely Palestine Action, a non-violent direct action protest group.

Three genocides. Mass killings in all cases. Total impunity. One perpetrator supported by western countries (of course Israel), another whose supporters are western allies, and only in Ukraine is Putin condemned as the criminal he is, though of course he has yet to face any consequences, and Donald Trump calls him a 'nice guy'.

This past week also saw the thirtieth anniversary of the mass murder of Bosniaks by Serb forces in Srebrenica, killings that took place in full view of outside countries and where most of the killers went unpunished. Each time a genocide happens, it is only slowly condemned, and the guilty often unaccountable, only rarely prosecuted, and then late and slowly. Srebrenica demonstrated that the world was content to stand by while mass murder took place, Rwanda likewise. And today, Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine.

At this point, people tend to say things like 'never again!' when such sentiments are demonstrably hollow, or 'will humanity never learn?' an empty rhetorical question that, like the so-called question of evil, takes us nowhere. What tends to happen is that individual leaders such as Putin or the RSF's commanders or Serbia's Milosevic are, at least eventually, correctly vilified as the criminal leaders and instigators. But it is only a few.

Recent history, including of today, suggests that this - very limited - accountability is utterly insufficient to deter future 'genocidaires'. Three genocides are happening right now and that's ignoring the systematic repression and abuse of various ethnic groups around the world including Tibetans and Uighurs in China, for instance, where women are forcibly sterilized in order slowly to annihilate those ethnicities.

It would help if today's supposedly-civilized countries would admit their own genocides of the past, such as Germany's mass slaughter in the country that was later to become Namibia, or Belgium's killings of perhaps millions of Congolese during the colonial period. Britain's actions in the sub-continent, in particular its actions that directly contributed to the deaths of three million during the Bengal famine of 1943, also amount to genocide. In Africa, the enslavement of millions - for centuries - was enthusiastically and lawfully practiced by Europeans and white Americans. Or, dare I say it, the annihilation of the indigenous peoples of America by European settlers with the help of the US government, a genocide that ended only in 1890 with the massacre at Wounded Knee, and continued, albeit less bloodily, through forced sterilization, police violence and the destruction of indigenous cultures well into the 20th century, and arguably today.

The only genocide in history that has been thoroughly confessed to and scrutinised in detail is of course the Holocaust. Germany has set an example of accounting for and commemorating the genocide of perhaps 11 million Jews, Roma, gay and disabled people by the Nazis.

Other countries however have yet to own up to their own actions which, to a degree (and only a degree), helped the Nazis in preparing the genocide: the widespread anti-semitism of other European countries and the US. Who today remembers the Evian conference on Jewish refugees in 1938, convened by that nice Mr Roosevelt, where 32 countries agreed to do nothing about restrictions on the numbers of German Jews, escaping the Nazis, they were prepared to allow in (one country alone agreed to take more refugees).

But even in Germany there is Holocaust denial. Until banned under the law, the slogan 'Alles fuer¹ Deutschland' was chanted at political rallies for the AFD - Alternative fuer Deutschland. The slogan was originally that of the Sturmabteilung, or SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, which perpetrated the beatings, humiliations, tortures and murders of Jews and the Nazis’ political opponents in the years leading up to and during the Hitler dictatorship, including the notorious pogrom so-called ‘Kristallnacht’ in 1938 when thousands of Jewish businesses, and hundreds of synagogues, were attacked and destroyed across Germany, hundreds killed and hundreds more committed suicide rather than face the savagery of the SA - 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. After the ban, AFD supporters changed the chant to 'Alice fuer Deutschland' referencing Alice Weidel, the leader of the AFD, as a cynical way of showing their defiance of the ban. A leading member of the AFD would work up crowds at party rallies by shouting 'Alles fuer!' before the audience shouted back 'Deutschland!'.

But amid this grim history and present, there are lessons to be learned that might, just might, help prevent future genocides. All genocides, whether in Bosnia, Gaza or Rwanda, share one common feature if not others. The dehumanization of the victims. Bosniaks, Rwandan Tutsis and Jews were depicted as sub-human and also, notably, responsible for the country's ills - in Germany, Jews were presented as the cause of the country's humiliation in the First World War and economic disaster of the 20's and 30's. Bosniaks were presented in Serbian propaganda as Muslim extremists, Islamists intent on destroying supposedly ancient Christian culture in former Yugoslavia. Tutsis, murdered in their hundreds of thousands by Hutus, were called ‘cockroaches’. All ludicrous, almost playground accusations. But widely believed.

It is the dehumanization of other peoples and races that mark the origin of every genocide now and in history. Not every dehumanization will lead to a genocide of course, but it always causes harm of some kind when Donald Trump denigrates 'shithole countries', blames migrants for eating pets and committing violent crime, or when Nigel Farage, here in Britain, laments the demise of 'British, Christian culture' thereby by implication - by dogwhistle - attacking the non-Christian inhabitants of my country - and of course we all know he means Muslims. I note that Britain is a country where only 10% of the population regularly attend Christian church - that means just once a month. It was the same percentage forty years ago, indicating that it is not immigration that has undermined Christian observance, it is the longstanding secularisation of modern society.

Dehumanization reached grotesque proportions in Nazi Germany and Rwanda, and former Yugoslavia - a routine trope in all three was the killing and sometimes consumption of babies by the marginalised and soon-to-be-annihilated group. But by the time we see such characterisations emerge, it is too late. Far too late. The dehumanization of ‘The Ohter’ other has reached its peak. Their destruction comes next.

Instead look out for routine or legalized (or legally ignored) discrimination, dog whistling, overt and implicit racism, indeed the very notion that other humans are different from 'us', whoever that is in our long-hybrid histories, and thereby less worthy. This is where dehumanization begins.

I have had the privilege of living in many different countries during my adult life. I count many different nationalities among my friends - my children enjoy three different nationalities. And of course - platitude alert - what I see is that we are all pretty much the same. Saharawi², Kurdish, Somali - our desire for peace, security and sufficient for a decent and dignified life for ourselves and our children, is exactly the same. It shouldn't need mentioning, but unfortunately does, that the biological genetic differences between different 'races' is nil, as confirmed by numerous scientific studies.

Indeed the very notion of race - of difference itself - originated in the colonial era as a justification for domination, exploitation and the theft of territory and destruction of culture. It was a political, or social, construction - created to justify violent conquest and eradication of native populations - in other words, genocide³.

It is in fact only the ‘genocidaires’ who are different. When they allege difference, claim threats to their supposedly monolithic and uniquely valuable culture, and attribute everything that's wrong to other groups - immigrants, other faiths, women - it is at this point, and not a moment later, that they must be resisted. It is all too evident, perhaps needless to say, that this point has been reached in political discourse in today's America, Britain and indeed Germany and across Europe. That point is, tragically, long past in Russia, Israel and Sudan.

1. I can’t find how to add umlaut accents in SubStack so use the alternative of ‘ue’

2. The indigenous people of the Western Sahara, whose existence the occupier of their land, Morocco, denies.

3. Its close relation is the notion of the survival of the fittest, a bastardization of Darwin who never used the term, to justify the exploitation and indeed dehumanization intrinsic to capitalism.