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December 24, 2019 - April 13, 2020
no new world vision had yet replaced the old world order,
The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred.
But time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why.
Before I began exploring America’s relationship with genocide, I used to refer to U.S. policy toward Bosnia as a “failure.” I have changed my mind. It is daunting to acknowledge, but this country’s consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective. The system, as it stands now, is working.
No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on.
Morgenthau had to remind himself that one of the prerogatives of sovereignty was that states and statesmen could do as they pleased within their own borders. “Technically,” he noted to himself, “I had no right to interfere. According to the cold-blooded legalities of the situation, the treatment of Turkish subjects by the Turkish Government was purely a domestic affair; unless it directly affected American lives and American interests, it was outside the concern of the American Government.”21 The ambassador found this maddening.
America’s nonresponse to the Turkish horrors established patterns that would be repeated. Time and again the U.S. government would be reluctant to cast aside its neutrality and formally denounce a fellow state for its atrocities. Time and again though U.S. officials would learn that huge numbers of civilians were being slaughtered, the impact of this knowledge would be blunted by their uncertainty about the facts and their rationalization that a firmer U.S. stand would make little difference. Time and again American assumptions and policies would be contested by Americans in the field closest
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Lemkin was appalled that the banner of “state sovereignty” could shield men who tried to wipe out an entire minority. “Sovereignty,” Lemkin argued to the professor, “implies conducting an independent foreign and internal policy, building of schools, construction of roads . . . all types of activity directed towards the welfare of people. Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people.”2 But it was states, and particularly strong states, that made the rules. Lemkin read about the abortive British effort to try the Turkish perpetrators and saw that states would
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Lemkin drafted a paper that drew attention both to Hitler’s ascent and to the Ottoman slaughter of the Armenians, a crime that most Europeans either had ignored or had filed away as an “Eastern” phenomenon. If it happened once, the young lawyer urged, it would happen again. If it happened there, he argued, it could happen here.
Bella, a painter, linguist, and student of philosophy who home-schooled her three sons, explained that once the state became determined to wipe out an ethnic or religious group, the police and the citizenry became the accomplices and not the guardians of human life.
Lemkin was not the only European who had learned from the past. So, too, had Hitler.
in August 1939, Hitler met with his military chiefs and delivered a notorious tutorial on a central lesson of the recent past: Victors write the history books.
“I grant you some Jews will suffer under Hitler, but this is the lot of the Jews, to suffer and to wait.”
“In the last war, 1915–1918, we lived three years under the Germans,” the baker said. “It was never good, but somehow we survived. I sold bread to the Germans; we baked for them their flour. We Jews are an eternal people, we cannot be destroyed. We can only suffer.”
This disbelief, this faith in reason, in human contact, in commerce, convinced millions to remain in place and risk their fates.
Only a small number of Jews had Lemkin’s foresight. The vast majority expected persecution and maybe even the occasional pogrom, but not extermination.
Many generations spoke through this man.
He could not believe the reality of [Hitler’s intent], because it was so much against nature, against logic, against life itself, and against the warm smell of bread in his house, against his poor but comfortable bed. . . . There was not much sense in disturbing or confusing him with facts. He had already made up his mind.19
“Statesmen are messing up the world, and [only] when it seems to them that they are drowning in the mud of their own making, [do] they rush to extricate themselves.”
Churchill had thundered. “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”32
It was not that readers’ prejudice against Jews necessarily made them happy to hear reports of Hitler’s monstrosity. Rather, their indifference to the fate of Jews likely caused them to skim the stories and to focus on other aspects of the war. Others did not take the time to process the reports because they believed the Allies were doing all they could; there was no point in getting depressed about something they could not control.
The perpetrators of genocide would attempt to destroy the political and social institutions, the culture, language, national feelings, religion, and economic existence of national groups.
They would hope to eradicate the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and lives of individual members of the targeted group.
Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.
A group did not have to be physically exterminated to suffer genocide. They could be stripped of all cultural traces of their identity. “It takes centuries and sometimes thousands of years to create a natural culture,” Lemkin wrote, “but Genocide can destroy a culture instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour.”
They also recognized that it would be unwise and undesirable to make Hitler’s crimes the future standard for moving outsiders to act.
Statesmen and citizens needed to learn from the past without letting it paralyze them.
A set of universal, higher norms, was needed as a backstop to national law. The “theory of master race had to be replaced,” he said, by a “theory of master morality.”
Lemkin wrote: It seems inconsistent with our concepts of civilization that selling a drug to an individual is a matter of worldly concern, while gassing millions of human beings might be a problem of internal concern. It seems also inconsistent with our philosophy of life that abduction of one woman for prostitution is an international crime while sterilization of millions of women remains an internal affair of the state in question.
Even if genocide were not punished, at least the court could help popularize the new term.
Lemkin argued that when a group was targeted with genocide—and was effectively destroyed physically or culturally—the loss was permanent. Even those individuals who survived genocide would be forever shorn of an invaluable part of their identity.
He simply believed that if the law was in place it would have an effect—sooner or later.”
the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide settled on a definition of genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: A. Killing members of the group; B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; C. Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; D. Imposing measures intended to prevent
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The perpetrator’s particular motives for wanting to destroy the group were irrelevant.
What mattered was that one set of individuals intended to destroy the members of a group not because of anything they did but because of who they were.
Nearly four decades would pass before the United States would ratify the treaty, and fifty years would elapse before the international community would convict anyone for genocide.
In June 1949 President Harry Truman heartily endorsed the genocide convention, calling on U.S. senators to ratify it because America had “long been a symbol of freedom and democratic progress to peoples less favored” and because it was time to outlaw the “world-shocking crime of genocide.”
Dean Rusk, then deputy undersecretary of state, stressed that ratification was needed to “demonstrate to the rest of the world that the United States is determined to maintain its moral leadership in international affairs.”
Reckoning with American brutality against native peoples was long overdue, but the convention, which was not retroactive, could not be used to press the matter. And although the United States’ dismal record on race certainly exposed it to charges of racism and human rights abuse, only a wildly exaggerated reading of the genocide convention left the southern lawmakers vulnerable to genocide charges.
Critics complained that the treaty was both too broad (and thus could implicate the United States) and not broad enough (and thus might not implicate the Soviet Union).
The exclusion of political groups from the convention made it much harder in the late 1970s to demonstrate that the Khmer Rouge were committing genocide in Cambodia when they set out to wipe out whole classes of alleged “political enemies.”
Genocide prevention was a low priority in the United States, and international law offered few rewards to the most powerful nation on earth.
In 1953, in the hopes of appeasing Bricker’s supporters, the president disavowed this and all human rights treaties.16 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles pledged that the administration would never “become a party to any covenant [on human rights] for consideration by the Senate.” He also flatly abrogated the Nuremberg precedent, charging that the genocide convention exceeded the “traditional limits” of treaties by attempting to generate “internal social changes” in other countries. The United States would advance human rights through education, Dulles declared, not through law.
It was not really until the 1970s that Americans became prepared to discuss the horrors. With America unwilling in the 1950s to confront Hitler’s Final Solution, it is not surprising that Lemkin, with his briefcase bulging with gruesome parables and his indefatigable, in-your-face manner, earned few friends on Capitol Hill.
Senator Bricker teamed with Senator McCarthy to deride all UN instruments as vehicles of world government and socialism that would swallow U.S. sovereignty and aid in a Communist plot to rule (and internationalize) the world.
Powerful right-wing isolationist groups would never come around. But most Americans, the senator believed, did not really oppose ratification; they were just misinformed. “The true opponents to ratification in this case are not groups or individuals,” Proxmire noted in one of 199 speeches he gave on the convention in 1967. “They are the most lethal pair of foes for human rights everywhere in the world—ignorance and indifference.”
every one . . . has as its objective the promotion of either profit or pleasure.73 The genocide convention, by contrast, dealt with people. Because it did not promote profit or pleasure for Americans, it did not easily garner active support.
while analogies to the Holocaust were invoked and isolated appeals made, in three years of systematic terror, a U.S. policy of silence was never seriously contested. It would have been politically unthinkable to intervene militarily and emotionally unpleasant to pay close heed to the horrors unfolding, but it was cost-free to look away.
He stripped citizens of basic freedoms, suspended parliament, and announced in October 1971 that it was time to end “the sterile game of outmoded liberal democracy.” In 1972 he declared himself president, prime minister, defense minister, and marshal of the armed forces. The United States cared only that Lon Nol was a staunch anti-Communist.
Before it begins, genocide is not easy to wrap one’s mind around.
