The scholarly and public recognition of any genocide, including the Holocaust, depends on the confluence of a host of factors and should be viewed as a rhetorical and argumentative achievement. Raul Hilberg, who wrote one of the most famous books that outlined some of the major features of the Nazi machinery that was responsible for the perpetration of ethnic cleansing of Jews,1 tells the story of how post-World War II publishers were reluctant to publish a book that went beyond recognition of concentration camps in analyses of death camps.2 Norman Finkelstein tried to explain some of the politics behind this reluctance:
Cold War politics thus influenced both the scholarly and public reception of some Holocaust research.It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didn’t tire of remembering the crimes of the West German “revanchists.”3
Before journalists traveled to Jerusalem to cover the Adolph Eichmann trial, few communities knew very much about the Judeocide.4 There was a deal of confusion about what happened in both the Nazi concentration camps as well as the death camps. Thanks to survivor testimony, the interrogation of massive numbers of German documents for Nuremberg prosecutions, and the curatorial efforts of those who assemble museological displays at places like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) we have learned a great deal. We have also learned how millions of global denizens can combat all types of Holocaust denialism. Thanks to these consciousness-raising efforts Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Sobibór are now recognizable names that appear in canonical academic Holocaust texts and in vernacular commentaries.
That said, some of the same community members who have applauded this Holocaust-consciousness-raising have oftentimes been circumspect in the ways that they evaluate calls for inclusion of other mass murders in the pantheon of acceptable genocides. As Alexander Hinton would note in 2017, critical genealogical studies of Holocaust scholarship and genocide studies would show that they had been “informed by an implicit canon and prioritization of cases, led by the Holocaust prototype and an exemplary triad consisting of the Armenian genocide, Holocaust, and Rwandan genocide.”5 Hinton elaborated by noting that some gatekeepers wanted to make sure that only a few genocides could meet the high standards set by that triad of historical incidents.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that only scholars want to place restrictions on the usage of genocidal labels. This is not some example of “mere rhetoric” where grammatological choices are inconsequential. The political fallout that came from belated interventionism in Srebrenica6 or Rwanda7 underscored the point that labeling of large-scale massacres as a “genocide”—the “g word”—carried weight and triggered potential legal, economic, social, and political repercussions.8
Interest in expanding the number of genocides—to include more “modern” genocides (like what is happening to the Rohingya in Myanmar)9 or “colonial genocides” (like the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in “German South West Africa”)10—waxes and wanes, depending on a number of factors, including the number of stakeholders, access to international presses, the historical sensibilities of audiences, the contours of public memories, and the presentist needs of communities.11
In March 2019, some readers of global news outlets were shocked to read that Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was demanding that Spain and the Vatican apologize for the violent conquest of Mexico.12 Mexico’s first leftist president in some seven decades has previously talked about reducing inequities in Mexico and helping combat poverty, and now President Obrador was tweeting out video addresses from archaeological sites as he explained to viewers that he wanted Felipe VI of Spain to acknowledge and apologize for the atrocities that were committed against “indigenous peoples for the violations of what we now call human rights.”13 Reconciliation was important, noted Obrador, but before that time the former conquerors needed to admit that the sword and the cross were used commit reprehensible colonial acts that warranted public acknowledgments and apologies. Spanish governmental officials in Madrid quickly rejected President Obrador’s request, and they publicized a text that indicated that the “arrival, 500 years ago, of Spaniards to present Mexican territory cannot be judged in light of contemporary considerations.”14
Was Obrador implying that Spanish conquerors had once carried out a “genocide” in this part of the world? Was Mexico’s president basing his arguments on scholarly research on these topics, or was his commentary directed at national or international audiences who might share some of his postcolonial views? It is telling that in a public survey that was conducted by the Center for Sociological Research in 1992, it was found that some 33 percent of those Spaniards surveyed indicated that they were “proud” of the Spanish conquest of America while only 5 percent mentioned any “genocide.”15 One Spanish lawmaker tweeted during the spring of 2019 that the Spaniards “went there and finished with the power of tribes who assassinated their neighbors cruelly and viciously,” and that was the reason why just a few Spanish warriors “conquered and civilized that land.”16 Spain’s Foreign Minister, Josep Borrell, noted that Spain would not offer any “extemporaneous apologies” to Mexico, and he elaborated by arguing that his nation had no interest in asking the French Republic for an apology for what Napoleon’s soldiers did when they invaded Spain. Borrell was fairly sure that the French were not going to demand “an apology from the Italians for Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul.”17
All sorts of moral equivalence arguments were being made in these contentious disputes over colonial wrongdoing and potential postcolonial apologies.18
Depending on the criteria that these arguers use, the availability of evidence, disciplinary expectations, and other rhetorical factors, scholars or members of public who write about colonial atrocities or imperial genocides can either contract, or they can expand, the list of administrative mass murders or ethnic cleansings that deserve to be called “genocides.” Is it possible that many twenty-first-century scholars and audiences are willing to use the term “genocide” when they talk about happened during the twentieth century in places like Armenia or Rwanda or Srebrenica but are unwilling to use that phrase in disputation over conquests that happened 500 years ago? How much time must have passed, and what other factors help influence the ways that academics, journalists, laypersons, and others converse about these topics?
In this particular book I join Alexander Hinton, A. Dirk Moses, and other critical genocide scholars who argue that it is time that Holocaust scholars and postcolonial critics start talking to each other as they revisit the question of how twenty-first-century social agents should define, describe, and explain everything from the causes of genocides to genocidal prevention. In place of more restrictive ways of defining genocide—that are often based on narrow interpretations of the work of Raphaël Lemkin19—I will be advocating that researchers operationally define genocides in more expansive ways by paying more attention to the structural, functional, or material features of large-scale massacres. Moreover, I will be arguing that members of the pub...