How can freedom of expression stop an ongoing genocide?
What are ways of exercising this freedom that can stop the mass killing of children?
What are the words that can stop a genocide?
We read and hear alternative words that, in more acceptable ways, describe the practices associated with genocide because this word, itself – genocide – is too terrible to be tackled. There is too much that people living the normality of our daily lives cannot simply reckon with. The assassination of an entire population, brought about with deliberate intent and systematic execution, like a work of passion and dedication, cannot really be expressed in ways that do justice to its victims because the victims are too busy dying. Genocide is a word that can be uttered only among those who will survive, mostly those who are committing genocide and those who are witnessing the genocide but are not its victims. And if victims are too busy dying, and witnessing the agony of the dear ones that are dying with them, genocide is a word that have currency only among those whose attention is not saturated by death – owns or others – but by the problem of making sense out of the genocide itself. How did we get here? And most importantly, what is going to happen next?
And the most interesting question of all: is there actually a genocide?
Which set of semantic criteria can be credibly put in place in support of the argument that the ongoing assassination of tens of thousands of men, women and children, the deliberate targeting of children, hospitals, schools, the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure and much more, does not qualify as genocide? Would ethnic cleansing be a better term?
The genocide deniers do not actually argue their point through semantics but by accusing those who argue the case for genocide of racism. The “right to self-defence” is the notion mobilized and deployed in support of an argument that ultimately justify genocide in the name of self-defence. Imagine if the logic of genocide as self defence would have applied to the many wars between e.g. France and Germany. But we all see the difference: balance of power. Genocide is a form of self-defence that only a vast superior power can apply against a far weaker enemy.
Can one genocide be justified or even explained by recalling the memory of another genocide?
One may wonder why, if a genocide can be committed with impunity, do the perpetrators put so much energies in denying their deeds and even attacking those who just use that word. Beside the problem with reputation among an “international community” that anyway is quite impotent to do anything about it, what is the point in denying a genocide? I don’t know the answer to this question. But when I think of it, I can’t help thinking that, especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition, blood sacrifice is the highroad to the sacred. Could it be that the genocide-deniers fear something else that whatever sanctions the ICC may bring upon its material perpetrators? Could it be that a genocide does something to the soul of the people who commit it? Can the effort to deny a genocide really save the people who commit it from Nemesis? The ancient Greeks knew all too well that the hiding or even denial of a hideous crime do not spare its perpetrators from the attention of this goddess because, to put it simply, even denial depends on conditions that ultimately bind the deniers to the awareness of their deeds.
When one genocide is justified through the institutional memory of an older genocide, the preservation of the latter will preserve the memory of the former. This is why, even if genocide becomes a banned word, if its users are effectively pinned down and silenced, those who committed genocide may have to live the rest of their lives remembering to forget.
Matteo Stocchetti
Matteo Stocchetti is docent in political communication at Helsinki University and Åbo Akademi, and principal lecturer at Arcada University of Applied Science.
Picture: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. “The massacre of the innocents” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1850 – 1870. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-3870-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
