12/10/2008 | Габелок

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg8apr08,0,1105273.column

The genocide loophole
Claims of the 'greater good' too often let mass murderers off the hook.
Jonah Goldberg
April 8, 2008
Last week, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolution insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine -- called the Holodomor in Ukrainian -- wasn't genocide.

Virtually no one, including the Russians, disputes that the Soviet government was involved in the deliberate forced starving of millions of people. But the Russian resolution indignantly insists: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines." It notes that victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas" of the Soviet Union.

Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers and their families because they were Ukrainians, we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers.

And that's all it takes to be acquitted of genocide.

The United Nations defines the crime as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." Intentionally left out of this definition are "modern" political labels for people: the poor, religious people, the middle class, etc.

The oversight was deliberate. The word "genocide" was coined by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who was responding to Winston Churchill's 1941 lament that "we are in the presence of a crime without a name." Lemkin, a champion of human rights who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust, gave it a name a few years later. But to get the U.N. to recognize genocide as a specific crime, he made compromises.

Under pressure from the Soviets, Lemkin supported excluding efforts to murder "political" groups from the U.N. resolution on genocide adopted in 1948. Under the more narrow definition that was approved, it's genocide to try to wipe out Roma (formerly known as Gypsies), but it's not necessarily genocide to liquidate, say, people without permanent addresses. You can't slaughter "Catholics," but you can wipe out "religious people" and dodge the genocide charge.

That type of absurdity is what Gerard Alexander, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, decries as "Enlightenment bias." Reviewing Samantha Power's moving 2003 book, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" for the Hedgehog Review, Alexander observed that this bias leaves the greatest mass murderers of the 20th century -- self-described Marxist-Leninists -- somewhat off the hook.

In Power's book, surely the most influential writing on genocide in a generation, she scolds the U.S. -- often justly -- for not doing more to stop systematized slaughter. But by focusing so narrowly on the U.N.-style definition of genocide, she implicitly upholds a moral hierarchy of evil, which in effect renders mass murder a second-tier crime if it is done in the name of social progress, modernization or other Enlightenment ideals.

This can lead to a dangerous way of thinking in which people who are perceived to be standing in the way of progress -- middle-class farmers opposed to collectivization, aristocrats, reactionaries -- can be more forgivably slaughtered than ethnic groups because they're allegedly part of the problem, not the solution. After all, you've got to break some eggs to make an omelet.

In general, the Soviets and the Red Chinese elude the genocide charge -- and hence the status of ultimate villains -- despite having murdered scores of millions of people in the 20th century, in large part because their victims stood in the way of progress. Kulaks, or independent farmers, opposed Stalin's plan for collectivization, and so they were murdered for that "greater good." Yet Mao Tse-tung and Stalin aren't widely regarded as being as evil as Adolf Hitler because they were "modernizers." Just look how the Russians have no problem copping to the charge of mass murder but recoil at the suggestion that it was racially motivated.

It's a wrongheaded distinction. Murder is murder, whether the motive stems from bigotry or the pursuit of allegedly enlightened social planning. And that's usually a false distinction anyway. Racial genocide is often rationalized as a form of progress by those responsible. Under the Holodomor, Ukrainian culture was systematically erased by the Russian Soviets, who saw it as inferior or expendable. No doubt the Sudanese janjaweed in Darfur and the Chinese People's Liberation Army in Tibet believe that they are "modernizers" too.

Or consider the ultimate racially motivated genocide, the Holocaust. Götz Aly and Susanne Heim demonstrate in their brilliant book, "Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction," that the Final Solution, particularly in Lemkin's own Poland, was perceived by the social engineers and young economists overseeing it as a "modernizing project that would transform society."

In Germany, the effort to crush Jewry was intertwined with the effort to nationalize the economy and eliminate small and independent businesses. For German social engineers, the Jews were convenient guinea pigs for their economic experiments. The first test cases, of course, were not the Jews but the mentally ill, who were classified as an economic liability in Germany's 1936 Four-Year Plan of economic modernization.

Of course, the climate of anti-Semitism made the Holocaust possible, but so did Enlightenment bias, which holds that almost anything can be justified in the name of progress.

I doubt such distinctions would have been of much comfort to Lemkin's 49 relatives.

jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com