Genocidology (CRIMES OF ATROCITY) with Dirk Moses

This episode explores the complex and deeply emotional subject of genocide, examining its definitions, historical instances, and the legal intricacies involved in prosecuting such crimes.

1. Genocide is defined legally through its intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
2. Historical contexts like the Holocaust and Armenian Genocide are crucial in understanding the evolution of the legal and societal perceptions of genocide.
3. The episode underscores the challenge of proving intent, which is crucial for genocide classification under international law.
4. It highlights the role of international courts like the International Criminal Court (ICC) in addressing and prosecuting crimes of atrocity.
5. Legal definitions and frameworks continue to evolve, reflecting the complexity and sensitivity needed to address genocide properly.

1: Introduction to Genocidology
Alie Ward introduces the topic and guest Dirk Moses, setting the stage for a discussion on genocide's complex nature. Key historical references and the legal definition of genocide are outlined.
Dirk Moses: "Genocide involves intent to destroy a group."

2: Historical Examples of Genocide
The conversation explores various historical genocides, discussing their impact on legal definitions and public consciousness.
Dirk Moses: "Every historical instance provides a unique perspective on the atrocities committed."

3: Legal Frameworks and Challenges
Dirk Moses explains the intricacies of international law concerning genocide, emphasizing the difficulty of proving intent.
Dirk Moses: "Proving intent is central to the legal definition of genocide."

4: Implications and Contemporary Issues
They discuss the modern implications of historical genocides and the role of international courts in prosecuting these crimes.
Alie Ward: "Understanding past genocides is crucial for addressing current and future atrocities."

1. Educate yourself on the history and legal definitions of genocide.
2. Support organizations working to prevent atrocities and aid survivors.
3. Engage in community discussions to raise awareness about the importance of recognizing and preventing genocide.
4. Advocate for stronger international legal frameworks to address crimes of atrocity.
5. Stay informed about current international conflicts and understand the signs of escalating violence that could lead to genocide.

The world is confusing, but there are experts in everything. In our least funny episode ever, we thankfully convinced a global expert, professor, researcher, author, and Genocidologist (it’s a real word) Dr. Dirk Moses to answer the questions that we may secretly have: What exactly is genocide? How long has it been happening? Is it a war crime? Is it a crime of atrocity? Who makes up humanitarian law? What's self-defense — and what's offense? How is it litigated? Whose business is it? Why do we do this to each other? What can be done? It’s a dense, long episode with lots of asides for history and context, but it might be just what you need to give you perspective on the conditions — and cycles of trauma — that can lead to crimes of atrocities.

People

Dirk Moses, Alie Ward

Companies

None

Books

"The Problem of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression" by Dirk Moses

Guest Name(s):

Dirk Moses

Content Warnings:

This episode contains discussions of violence, including genocide, which may be distressing to some listeners.

Alie Ward
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I love worms. I know I usually save my secrets. For the end of the episode, but I'm going to tell you my secret favorite candy. It's Reese's peanut butter cups. It's really Reese's.

Anything but. Reese's peanut butter cups are the thing that I'm like, have I had a bad day? I get these. Have I had a good day? I get these chocolate salty peanut butter.

Mercedes Maitland
The textures. I love everything about him. Also that there's two. So I'm like, oh, I get this one for later, which is 1 second later. Anyway, Reese's peanut butter cups.

Alie Ward
I love you. That's all. If you're me, you can shop Reese's. Peanut butter cups now at a store near you. Found wherever candy is sold.

And I am just a content warning up top. This episode contains information about crimes of atrocity and mentions of the murder of civilians and children, sexual violence, the holocaust, racism, religious prejudice, and of course, genocide. It's also, at times a general bummer and does not reflect the usual light hearted and comedic tone of ologies. Also, I happen to be recovering from laryngitis right now. I apologize for the quality of my voice.

Also, there are a lot of break in asides for context and history. There's a lot of it just to help you keep up with the experts references and to recap, oh, hello. It's a science podcaster and not a humanitarian rights lawyer, Allie Ward with an episode we all wish didn't exist. It's an episode on genocide, which is historically deeply complex. It's a legal issue.

It's a trauma issue. It's finely woven political strategy. Before this interview, I didn't know a lot about genocide or really even technically what it meant. So I wanted to talk to an expert in the science and the sociology of genocide. I did a ton of research all roads led to him.

I even asked the opinion of other experts in the topic who said, interview this guy. So we did. I was fortunate that he made time for us. And if there's ever an episode to be brave and ask a brilliant person a not brilliant question, it's now what is genocide? How long has it been happening?

Is it a war crime? Is it a crime of atrocity? Who makes up humanitarian law? What's self defense and what's offense? How is it litigated?

Whose business is it? Whose responsibility is it? Why do we do this to each other? What if you know that a situation is more complex and more detailed than is even divulged to the public? Patrons via patreon.com ologies sent in great and insightful questions, which we ask.

I even sent a draft of this episode to them first to get some feedback. Thank you for that. And also thank you to everyone who rates and who subscribes to the show. Thanks for the review this week from comp Door, who is a skeptically oriented scientist who said they will forever remain a faithful listener, whether or not I read their review, which I did. And thank you to everyone again for spreading the word about the show.

Now, genocide, so it comes from the Greek for Geno, or race and side meaning to kill. So here we go. And I want to say here I think everyone wants the same thing. I think everyone wants to be safe, to have enough, to not feel threatened, and to love who they love peacefully without watching their backs. Groups of people are made of individuals who are scared, who want safety, security, and happiness and love.

I want that for every single person listening. I want that for every person who is suffering or who has ever suffered. I never want anyone to listen to the show and not feel included or understood. Everyone has a birthday and a first crush and hopes and songs that make them cry and a favorite dessert. Everyone deserves love and safety.

Fear and threats and scarcity bring out the worst in humanity, and we look to forces greater than us to protect us. Who protects whom, and why is it necessary? So with that in mind, this episode looks at violent conflict from a broad lens and then into the fine details of word by word international law. It is not an up to the minute news piece, and we're covering as much ground as we can in a single episode to talk about historic genocides, the origins of the words, and human conflict. Now this is, in my opinion, the best expert we could have possibly gotten for the episode.

He has been writing books about genocide for decades, has been a distinguished professor of global human rights history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also taught at the University of Sydney and the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He's currently a professor of political science and a researcher of genocide at City College of New York and has been the senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research since 2011. In 2021, he published the book the Problem of Genocide, Permanent Security and the language of Transgression. So please open your brains up like a giant satchel and get ready for a massive amount of information in history and context with professor of international relations, crimes of atrocity, researcher, author and the world's foremost expert, genocide doctor, Dirk Moses.

First thing I'll have you do, if. You don't mind saying your first and. Last name, Dirk Moses. Hear him? Great and off the top.

Mercedes Maitland
This is not an episode I necessarily. Ever thought I would do, but I'm. Really pleased to be talking to you. When this topic came up, I thought, I wish I could just sit down with Dirk Moses and talk to him about this. You're certainly one of the world's leading experts on this.

Can you tell me a little bit. About your personal and scholastic journey to. Becoming an expert in genocide? Sure. Happy to.

Dirk Moses
So, as your listeners can tell from my accent, I'm not from the US, I'm from Australia. In my case, I have a german mother and an australian father who studied in Germany, where they met, and he taught german history at the University of Queensland for a generation. So german history was in the household and in the family, and that meant the Nazi Germany, the Holocaust. These kind of books were in the library, as well as german and israeli colleagues who would pass through and would chat. Even as a lad, it's made an impact.

And at university I studied Australia history, where the question of indigenous people and what happened to them, this is now in the mid eighties. So off I went to graduate school in the US in the 1990s and in Germany and worked on a dissertation on post war Germany and how it dealt with the nazi past. At the same time, in the second half of the nineties, a heated debate developed in Australia about genocide in relation to the practice of stealing indigenous children from their families. A bit like the boarding school case in the US and Canada. And I became engrossed in that and I ended up writing on all these topics and at some point I joined them up in the sense of linking colonial imperial history to the german case.

And I became interested in the concept of genocide. Like, why do we even have this concept? So I did a kind of conceptual history of genocide in my latest book. So Dirk studied history, government and law for his bachelor's. Got a master's in philosophy in early modern european history, another master's in modern european history, and his PhD, also in modern european history from Berkeley.

Alie Ward
And his cv of papers and books and academic appointments and visiting professorships, fellowships and grants and anthology contributions is 22 pages long, single spaced, a 22 page long cv. He is, no exaggeration, one of the top global scholars in genocide, and has dedicated the last 30 plus years to active examination on the topic. How he gets through each day without sobbing. Morning tonight is something we'll address later. Did you find that the World War two and the Holocaust, did that have any emotional impact in your family?

Was it talked about growing up? Was it something that you felt there was a presence on your mind about it? It was. I mean, I should add. So the listeners are confused, despite my surname, Moses, not a jewish name.

Dirk Moses
So it wasn't a jewish household, where obviously the impact of the Holocaust would be very different. So my mother's from a german lutheran family and my father's got various diverse immigrant heritage, but even so, the Holocaust was quite present. My mother was born in 1941, so in the middle of the war and migrated to Australia in the mid sixties. And she became an academic leader as well, a university president, and, you know, instituted fellowships for indigenous scholars, indigenous students and so forth. So she made this link between german historical justice and australian historical justice.

And of course, my father taught these issues at the University of Queensland in Australia. The hardest part, it seems, about a lot of the discussions on genocide is defining it. Let's start with the terminology's conception, which dates back to 1944 via a polish lawyer who had escaped Europe and come to the US to teach at Duke University in the early 1940, 1940s. Now, in his earlier years as a law student, he was outraged to learn of the armenian genocide and also anti semitic pogroms, which are massacres of groups of people. So Dirk gives us more background.

I did, yeah. His name was Raphael Lumpkin and he was a polish jewish scholar, and he was living in Poland until forced at Lee by the Nazis. And, you know, and Poland itself had plenty of anti semitism at that point, which he had to confront, although he was also a polish patriot. So he ends up fleeing via Sweden, he ends up in North Carolina at Duke University, and he floats around american universities on the east coast from the early forties onwards and also does a stint with the US government. And he's a sort of minor adviser during the Nuremberg trials.

Alie Ward
The Nuremberg trial, side note, took place in 1945 to 1946, after World War Two ended. And we'll talk more about them later. But while the 1939 to 1945 World War Two was still raging, lawyers and scholars were already discussing repercussions. And an international debate is taking place by the time he gets to duke in the early sort of as of 1942, about, you know, what are we going to do with the nazi war criminals when we win the war? Because by then, you know, it was a question of time.

Dirk Moses
But at some point, we would overwhelm the Germans with the Soviets. And people were thinking, well, we don't want to make the mistakes of the missed opportunity to properly prosecute german war criminals after the first World War. So the first World War, of course, occurred between July 1914 and November 1918. And during this conflict, roughly 9 million soldiers died, but so did an estimated 8 million civilians. And during this conflict, the german army deployed chemical weapons in the form of chlorine and mustard gas, despite that being against the 1899 and 1907 Hague conventions, which were some of the first international laws in terms of war crimes.

Alie Ward
Also during the first World War, the Ottoman Empire, now Turkey, launched what is now considered by dozens of countries as the armenian genocide. So up to one and a half million Armenians died by death marches into the syrian deserts, where they suffered famine and lack of water and sexual assaults, concentration camps, and, of course, mass. So after World War one, with the advent especially of new weaponry and this whole new military industrial complex, these crimes of war were on an international stage, and it was time to look at them. And there were varying views on this. But one of the things everyone agreed with was that there was a lack of international war on this topic.

Dirk Moses
Like, what war would you prosecute the Germans for? You can't just make it up. And lawyers love precedents. They don't like inventing new precedents. They want to go back to an existing precedent.

And there was an international debate about developing international law then in the early mid 1940s, and it landed on various concepts and laws with the Nuremberg trials, the international military Tribunal, as it was called. And there the leading crime was crime against peace or aggressive warfare, not genocide. And then crimes against humanity. And then war crimes. Yep.

Alie Ward
When you think of the Nuremberg trials, they weren't on trial for genocide. The charge was a crime against peace. That is like stealing a tank and using it to intentionally kill people. And then just being charged for, like, grand theft auto. I didn't know this.

And it's horrifying. So Lemkin was making a bid to be included. His new concept, to be included in these trials. Now, in the end, crimes against humanity, which was the alternative concept, was only selectively applied because the great powers didn't want to have a precedent of applying crimes against humanity to their own citizens. They didn't want to establish a precedent that an international tribunal could prosecute America for the crimes of Jim Crow, or the British for what it does in its empire, or the Soviets for what it did to its civilian population in the twenties and thirties and forties.

Dirk Moses
Right? Which is terrible crimes. So despite these historical atrocities and massacres and use of warfare, violating international treaties and mass casualties seen in the russian civil war and revolutions, as many as 10 million, mostly civilians, there were still plenty of legal loopholes. By design, law is a very specific discipline, and they carved out a quiet backdoor exit for those injustices. They limited it to wartime applications.

So crimes against humanity committed during the war, which meant that the german persecution of german jewish citizens from 1933 to 1939 were not included. Why? Because they happened pre war. So the big gaps in Nuremberg, which is kind of scandalous when you look back. So after the Nuremberg trials finished around one by, I think, in October 1946, various parties in the General assembly said, look, you know, there are gaps here.

We need to fill them. We need to have genocide as a possibility during peacetime, for example. And a resolution was passed, the General assembly, calling for a convention, and that passed overwhelmingly. Although the British were not really enthusiastic about this, the French were against it. The Americans didn't oppose it, but they weren't thrilled because they didn't want to establish, as I hinted before, an international law that could apply to them.

So over the next two years, various committees of the United Nations, a definition was thrashed out and then agreed upon ultimately in late 1948. And that's the definition we have today. A couple of things need to be said about it. Lemkin had a very broad definition of genocide. And what is that definition exactly?

Alie Ward
Okay, so Doctor Lemkin introduced the term genocide in his 1944 book, Axis rule in Occupied Europe, Laws of Occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress. And in that he wrote, buckle up, because this is verbatim and this is the foundation of the entire field and humanitarian law as it stands. So he wrote, by genocide, we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. And it is intended to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan, he writes, would be disintegration of the political and the social institutions of culture and language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.

Genocide, he continues, is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. And he writes that genocide has two phases. One, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group, and the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor, which is allowed to remain after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressors own nationals. So by Lemkin's definition, stripping a national population of the things that make it so, like political and economic stability and physical safety, like access to food and water and medicine and culture and religion, and ultimately being alive, so that the oppressing force can impose their national way on those people and that territory, or just eliminate that oppressed group and take the land and colonize it. So that was Lemkin's vision put forth in 1944, and we'll be talking about the reaction and the acceptance of that definition and how it's changed since.

But decades before World War one, World War two, and the Holocaust. And even Lemkin's definition were these internal national agreements and treaties. They were called the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which, Dirk explains, regulate what a state can and cannot do when it's occupying enemy territory. For example, a state can't transfer its own civilians into that territory, and it's limited in exploiting natural resources like mining and forestry. Also included in those Hague conventions, a state can't go executing civilians, and there needs to be a pause in combat while nonviolent negotiations happen according to these historical Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907.

Dirk Moses
That governed, how should occupying powers conduct themselves when they win in a war, occupy foreign territory? And then there's a period in which a peace treaty is thrashed out several months, maybe a year, the rights of the indigenous population or the occupied population are guarded and so forth. Now, what Lemkin pointed out was that those laws did not foresee the radicality of the german occupation. What they didn't foresee is that the Nazis were intent on destroying nations, like destruction of collectives called nations and ethnicities, for example, the polish nation. So during the war, the second world War, the polish government issued these books detailing what the Nazis were doing to Poland as a whole.

You know, they were executing elites. They were preventing the education of children in the polish language. They were exploiting minerals and cutting down the forest, so kind of laying waste and plundering the society and its natural resources and leading ultimately, as they put it, to the destruction of the polish nation. You know, they would talk in terms of the spirit of the polish people and so forth, but they're referring to culture. There's sort of a generalized assault on, say, the polish people.

Alie Ward
And part of the concept of genocide, as outlined by Doctor Lemkin, isn't just the destruction of a people, but the intent to commit cultural genocide or culturicide. Though the United nations doesn't count culture aside on its own as genocide. Now, when looking at terminology, there are nations of people which share a language and a culture, and typically the same geographic location. But a state is a group of people who live within formal boundaries, and they share a government and political independence. So a nation is not necessarily a state and vice versa.

And in a world war wherein nations of individuals are victimized across different states, international laws can get blurred, Dirk explains. Now, of course, there was a generalized assault on the jewish people. But bear in mind that the Jews of Europe were all citizens of particular states. And the states said, well, you know, we regard them as Poles. Legally speaking, we want to prosecute the Germans for what they did to polish citizens.

Dirk Moses
Whereas the world Jewish Congress and other jewish institutions quite accurately understood that the Nazis had an intent to destroy the jewish people as such, which transcended these citizenships. In any event, Lemkin was trying to introduce the notion of the destruction of nations into international law, which crimes against humanity doesn't quite capture. And when they're attacked just for being civilians, it's really protecting the category of the civilian separate from their notion of an ethnic or national identity. So again, genocide, which was not a legal concept during World War two, involves actions specifically targeting certain protected groups, national, ethnic, racial, or religious. Now, war crimes are just that.

Alie Ward
They're acts committed or ordered by individuals during a war. And they involve inhumanities like taking hostages and torture and this wanton destruction of civilian property, sexual assault in wartime, the murder of prisoners of war, stealing from civilians, or drafting children into the military. Of course, mass killings and genocide. Now, crimes against humanity as a legal concept is a little bit different. It involves actions targeting civilians in general, regardless of their national identity group, whether they are foreign or a part of the same state as the aggressor.

And crimes against humanity can happen both in wartime and in peace. War crimes only happen during war. From what I understand in terms of the terminology, which is very sticky, hate crime, war crime. Crime against humanity. And then, as you call it, or others call it, genocide.

Mercedes Maitland
The crime of crimes, the ultimate crime to commit. Along the way up, who is determining what is a war crime, what is a hate crime? And also as someone who is not well versed in the art and the horrors of war. And this is going to sound like a not informed question, but it's all bad. You're killing all kinds of people for probably not great reasons when it's all a horror show and typically rooted in injustice and creed and defense anyway, what do those levels mean?

It's almost like fire danger levels or something. What is that? This is a really terrific question. And you get at the Sadie issues. Ali.

Dirk Moses
The notion of a crime of crimes was posited by Lemkin, who was trying to enjoy his new category and concept as a very attractive option for people in the international community. No one knew what this work was. It was a really new idea, but it caught on immediately because the Nazis had a try to destroy many nations. And so of course, the leaders of those nations fastened on this new concept to articulate what they'd gone through. Now, technically speaking, in, say, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, there is no hierarchy.

Crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide are co equal. In case like me, you need some context on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Let's get into it. This might be along aside, it's very informative. So let's start with the International Criminal Court.

Alie Ward
So this is a permanent international court of about 120 countries that have collectively agreed to prosecute individuals who commit crimes, including genocide, and including conspiracy to commit genocide and complicity in genocide. They also prosecute crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression, which is the use of armed force by one state against another. Now, the International Criminal Court, it all kind of came up and arose in the 1990s. And in 1998, many states gathered in Rome to outline their founding treaty, which is called the Rome Statute. And this is an 89 page document.

It outlines those four types of crimes I just mentioned about genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression. So when it came time to adopt this treaty, the US requested that votes be non recorded or cast anonymously, and 120 states voted to adopt. 21 countries abstained. And seven countries straight up voted against the treaty. But it was non recorded, so we don't know who they are.

Just kidding. Later, a New York Times reporter conducted a bunch of interviews and an investigation which revealed which countries voted against it. And the seven countries in opposition were. I'm just going to do this in alphabetical order. China, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, the United States and Yemen.

So the US has been in opposition to the ICC, this international criminal court, over the years, depending on the president, and also citing that certain military actions are justifiable. And there were some other earlier criticisms of the ICC, that it leaned toward western states in favor of them, although it's most heavily supported in the global south. So I'm going to recap, chronologically speaking, what we've got going on in terms of international courts and conventions and treaties for war crimes. So I mentioned the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, but there was actually the first Geneva Convention, which was before that, now the first Geneva convention. This is a treaty established in 1864 as the US civil war.

Death tolls were close to a million. There were battles and wars all over Europe. And there was a swiss businessman, Henry Dinat. Holy shit. Buckle up.

Okay, this is a story. So Henry Dinat from Geneva had a business going around to colonies in french Algeria and Tunisia and growing corn in them. And in 1859, he's trying to get some land rights and some water rights. And he went to northern Italy to schmooze with the french emperor Napoleon III. And he had a whole booklet telling him how cool he was.

He's hoping to get some favors. And as he's there, he happens upon an italian battlefield that is littered with 40,000 bleeding and dying soldiers and fresh corpses with really no one helping anyone. This is like half of Coachella in bodies. So Henry, with this little booklet of praise he'd plan to use to kiss Napoleon's ass to do some colonizing, was like, hold up. What the fuck is happening here?

So he started getting together local help. He rushes around, he finds a lot of women and girls roundup supplies. He goes to negotiate to free capture doctors and use his money and donations he's collecting to put up emergency hospitals for the wounded, no matter which side of the battle they're on. Henry Dinant then went on to establish an organization to help sick and wounded people called the Red Cross, which is really the seat of the Geneva conventions. I didn't know that the Red Cross had anything to do with the Geneva conventions until this episode.

So in 1864, we saw the first of four Geneva conventions which have been expanded over the years. But that first document in 1864, set out to make sure that wounded and sick soldiers were treated humanely and that humanitarian aid workers were also protected. Also, Henry, this guy who pushed for the Red Cross and all these conventions, well, he lost all of his money, and he lived in poverty, and he was shunned by his friends and acquaintances because of his failed business. He was sick, and from what I gather, he was couchsurfing at the end of his life with people who would accept him in his old age. And then in the late 1890s, someone was like, whoa, this guy's life story is wild.

More people should know about him. What ended up happening to him? Well, in 1901, elderly, frail, sick, broke, Henry won an award, the world's first Nobel peace prize. And people were like, hmm, can you give him some of the prize money now? Because the dude is quite elderly and nearly penniless.

So they put in an account where his creditors couldn't tap it for his debts. And he lived a very meager existence so that he could will the rest of the prize money to humanitarian aid anyway. Red Cross Geneva conventions. A little backstory now, moving on to 1899 and 1907, pre World War one. We had those Hague conventions of 1890, 919, 99, and 1907, which, as Dirk mentioned, defined how an occupying force must act in regard to killing of civilians and exploiting natural resources and putting a pause on violence.

While peace negotiations happen now, post World War two, peace treaties and protocols were obviously kicked up a notch to put that lightly. And 1945 saw the formation of the United nations with what's called the UN Charter. This is a long document out outlining its purposes and protocols. And according to its preamble, the UN exists to maintain international peace and security and to take effective collective measures for the prevention and the removal of threats to the peace, and to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self determination of peoples, and to achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of economic and social and cultural or humanitarian. And it also seeks to promote and encourage respect for human rights, for fundamental freedoms for all, without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

So the UN also established something called the ICJ. Now, this is the International Court of Justice, which is the sole international court that works on disputes between nations. It's based in the Hague in the Netherlands, and this is different from that ICC that we mentioned earlier. But if you're like, wait, what is the Hague? Is the Hague a weird bunker where war criminals are held with no television sets or fun?

No. Rather, the Hague is a city with an article in front of it, like the Seattle or Le Paris. And the Hague is simply this whole ass dutch city, and it sits on the coast of the North Sea. And it happens to be the location of several international humanitarian courts, including the ICC, which we talked about earlier that can try individuals for war crimes, but that a lot of the possibly worst offenders don't endorse. Now, Hague is also the headquarters of the UN's International Court of Justice, which can try nations as a whole instead of just individuals, like the ICC does.

Okay, moving on. 1949, additional conventions and protocol are added to those first Geneva conventions, and they include protection and care for wounded and sick soldiers, and for those involved in maritime battles and for prisoners of war, and lastly for civilians. It also calls for protections for civilian medical personnel and equipment and supplies. And it requires humane treatment for all persons in enemy hands. And it specifically prohibits murder and mutilation, torture, cruel, humiliating, and degrading treatment, the taking of hostages, and unfair trials.

And it requires that the wounded and sick and shipwrecked be collected and cared for. It also grants humanitarian aid workers the right to offer their services to the parties in the conflict. So those are the additions to the Geneva Conventions from 1949. Now, in 1977, more protocols are added to those Geneva conventions, including one that recognizes that wars of national liberation, which are conflicts in which people are fighting against a colonial power to exercise self determination, those conflicts against colonists are considered international, and those are subject to international laws. But remember, we were talking about the ICC, that international law, criminal court, and the Rome Statute.

Which brings us back to more recent stuff. So, in 1998, that Rome Statute of the international criminal court laid out what war crimes are, and I'm going to tell you, they involve willful killing, torture, or inhumane treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly compelling a prisoner of war or other protected person to serve in the forces of the enemy or the hostile power. Willfully depriving a prisoner of war the rights to a fair and regular trial, unlawful deportation, taking of hostages, intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects, objects which are not military objectives, intentionally directing attacks against personnel, material units, or vehicles involved in a humanitarian assistance or a peacekeeping mission intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects, and attacking or bombarding towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives. Now, this Rome statute, it's 89 pages of international law documents. So, no, I did not read the whole thing.

I read as much as I thought you could possibly pay attention to. But now you have a little bit of background on the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the. UN Charter and the UN's International Court of Justice, which can settle legal disputes between states and give advisory opinions on legal matters on things like breach of previously agreed upon humanitarian treaties. There are also the additional provisions of the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which can try individuals for crimes of atrocity. And those include crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes of aggression, and, of course, genocide.

Also. Can I just say, yes, this episode is the least fun we've ever had together. I understand that this aside alone is like a week's worth of work, but if you like things like Dateline, well, boy, howdy, you should love war crimes and genocide, because it's murder. Literally millions of people forgotten and dismissed by the governments who killed them. Isn't any death by the hands of an oppressive or combatant force a horrible tragedy in the eyes of the law?

Dirk Moses
However, as you've, I think, accurately pointed out in international public opinion, let's put it that way, there is. There is a de facto hierarchy, and genocide is considered the worst crime of all the crime of crimes. And I think that's got a lot to do with the way there's a global memory of the Holocaust, and, you know, that developed over the last few generations. You know, understandably, this is, you know, a shocking. A shocking crime whose extent is hard to imagine when you think this is probably the largest number of children in the world history, of the 6 million, perhaps, what, 2 million children, you know, it's hard to.

It's hard to get your head around. And certainly, if you try to envisage it very concretely, it would keep you up at night endlessly. So. Intergenerational trauma is an ongoing consequence of war and oppression, and many studies have examined descendants of survivors. And there's this 120 19 paper, intergenerational consequences of the Holocaust on offspring mental health, a systematic review of associated factors and mechanisms.

Alie Ward
And this study looked at 23 different research papers of Holocaust survivors and noted that parental stress in a pre or postnatal period affects the stress system of offspring, leading to epigenetic and cortisol level changes. And while this paper only gathered data involving Holocaust survivors, the introduction acknowledges that nowadays, more than 65 million people around the world have been forced to leave home as a result of armed conflicts. And more than 21 million of them are refugees, of whom more than half are younger than 18 years of age. And exposure to war and violence not only has major consequences for society at large, but also has a detrimental impact on people's individual lives. And I checked that paper's source for that, for those statistics.

And via UNHRC, the UN refugee agency, it looks like since 2019, numbers have gone wildly up. And the most recent statistics, as of the end of 2022, are over 108 million people worldwide forcibly displaced right now. So research shows that the effects of violence and war and. And trauma affect how humans react to their environments and each other for generations. Do our bodies and our minds care about legal distinctions?

Dirk Moses
Now, there are a number of elements. When you ask about, you know, who is to decide what's what, whether it's a war crime, whether any particular incidents are war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. These are illegal issues. In the end, it's one thing for these claims to be made, say, by activists on the street, where advocates are saying, this is genocide, this is genocide. That's one thing.

It's another. For international lawyers appearing before an international tribunal, like the International Court of Justice or the ICC, the International Criminal Court, that's quite another matter. And there they have to stick very closely to the law, and the law has different requirements for each one. And my sense is that the prosecutors, for example, at the International Criminal Court, they look at a particular case, like the DA, as you call them here, we call them attorney general in Australia. When they're faced with a particular set of facts, say, an unlawful killing, they will say, hmm, do we have the evidence for murder one or manslaughter?

You know, where it's hard to prove intention, etcetera. They just look to see what they think they can do. And again, the International criminal court prosecutes individuals for war crimes, including torture and mutilation, corporal punishment, hostage taking, acts of terrorism, and violations of human dignity, such as rape and forced sex work, and looting and execution without trial. So those war crimes would be committed during a war. But the ICC also prosecutes genocide, which are acts with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, or a religious group.

Alie Ward
They also work on crimes against humanity, which would be widespread or systemic. Attacks directed against any civilian population. And crimes against humanity don't have to happen during wartime. Now, the ICJ, that's a different international court. That's the International Court of Justice.

That's the one started by the UN. And that handles not individuals, but disputes between the states when a state doesn't follow a treaty or a convention, or when a mediator is needed. And the UN Security Council can also enforce provisional measures. But some countries can exercise veto power and shut down those actions. The United States has exercised this veto power almost as many times as all the other nations combined.

Just last week, the US issued a veto on an otherwise highly backed and popular resolution that would have potentially given Palestine full UN membership, which many people say seems contrary to the US, saying they want a two state solution between Israel and Palestine. But when can these courts get involved so the UN's International Court of Justice can gather and order provisional measures, which are kind of like a temporary restraining. Order if there's reasonable plausibility that a nation is committing crimes of atrocity? You may have heard that in January of this year, South Africa accused Israel of genocide in Gaza via airstrikes, causing mass civilian casualties and of obstructing humanitarian aid into the region. And the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take measures to prevent and punish genocidal acts against Palestinians.

And since January, South Africa has raised more concern about starvation in the region, and the UN food agency's data deemed that famine is imminent. But the response from Israel claimed that the charges were, quote, wholly unfounded, in fact, and law morally repugnant, and represent both an abuse of the genocide convention and the court itself. And so that is ongoing. In the case of the Rwanda genocide in the mid 1990s, wherein government led gangs murdered over 800,000 Tutsi and moderate hoodoo Rwandans over 100 days, it took three years before the international tribunal began. The cases, and the tribunal wasn't officially closed until twelve years after that genocide.

Ultimately, 61 people were convicted for ordering an incitement genocide. Now, in terms of other modern genocides, the International Criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. This was established in 1993 by the United nations in response to the bosnian war from 1992 to 95, which involved mass slaughter of ethnic groups in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia and Macedonia. So one particular event in July of 1995 saw the massacre of over 8000 men and boys who were Bosniak Muslims. And the tribunal, in response to those war crimes was in operation until 2017, a full 15 years after the massacre.

Now, in Myanmar, there have been ongoing expulsions and killings of the Muslim Rohingya people by the Myanmar military, and the Republic of the Gambia brought this case to the International Court of Justice in 2019, and a year later, the court ordered Myanmar to take measures to prevent further genocide, though the conflict and the case remains ongoing a full eight years after the start of that violence, which Myanmar insists is simply a retaliation against illegal immigrant attacks. Clearly, the narratives change depending on the vantage point, which is why rulings on these issues can take years while the. Crises rage on and the requirements for genocide are particularly difficult. Which is one reason why at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the one for the former Yugoslavia, which wrapped up a few years ago, decades after the crimes of 1994. And around that period, most of the people who were prosecuted work for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Dirk Moses
Now, why is genocide so difficult to prove and therefore, to some extent considered high a crime? Although that's an illusion in some ways. But as you say, we're talking about mass violence against civilians. You know, war crimes and crimes against humanity about enough should be shocking us. It's because there's this intent requirement in genocide, you have to have the intention to destroy and holler, in part, an ethnic, racial or religious group.

Alie Ward
As such, those last two words are critical, and they're sneaky as such. And the as such was added in during these convention negotiations in 1947 and 1948 to limit the genocide concept as much as possible. Because, and you can see this at the debate transcripts, various people pointed out saying, well, you know, the Allies killed quite a lot of german civilians in the aerial bombing. Didn't they drop two atomic bombs in Japan? These were non combatants, really.

Dirk Moses
You know, you could argue some of the factory workers were somehow participating in the war effort, but this will be captured by a broad definition of genocide. So a distinction was made between a military logic to defeat, which may kill millions of civilians, a genocidal logic to destroy. And the rationale was that when the war is won, the killing stops. Whereas with genocide, destroying the enemy is an end in itself. The war, the point of the war is destruction of an enemy group.

As I point out in this recent book, the problems of genocide, if you take that to its logical conclusion, it's perfectly legal to kill as many innocent civilians in the conduct of war as you would in a genocide by arguing, look, this is a military logic or a military campaign to defeat an enemy and not to destroy an enemy. And so, yes, in current and past cases, the intent of eliminating or exterminating a group of people versus the we have to do this for military reasons gets very dicey. Now, in the real world, we might consider impact over intent. So I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, but I did. So I apologize, and I'm going to learn and do differently.

Alie Ward
But in war and military backing and the geopolitical landscape, the legal focus of international courts is the intent behind the destruction, which can be argued and examined in so many different ways depending on who's talking. And in his 2021 book, the Problems of Genocide, permanent security and the language of transgression, he writes, why privilege the intention of states and their armed forces? I dispute the doctrine of double effect. That is doing harm for the prospect of good, that permits the killing of innocence as a side effect of a moral end, like self defense. What does it matter to civilians if they're killed by violence inflicted with genocidal or with military intent?

He writes. So yeah, Dirk says a problem with the term genocide is that prosecution of it is tricky. The term genocide is legal. Macrame is a lot of loopholes, which. Conflicts have been found to be genocides.

Mercedes Maitland
And like you said, it takes decades sometimes of going through this legal system, which ones that we're familiar with may or may not be genocide. I know obviously people have heard about the Holocaust. Some people haven't heard about the armenian genocide. Canada recently distinguished residential schools as a genocide. However, the US has not at all looked at their treatment of indigenous tribes.

So which have been deemed a genocide? Was Rwanda, was Bosnia? Which ones have gotten that label? Sure. Once again, this allows us to disaggregate the theaters or sites in which these kind of decisions are made.

Dirk Moses
One is governments, the government of Canada, or what have you, through a parliamentary resolution deeming various cases to be genocidal. And this is not really legal determination. It's not a court of law, it's a political agency or entity. And I think in Canada there are five or six that they've denoted to be genocide, and they're the ones that are then represented in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg, about which I've written a bit and visited a few times. So because it's a government entity, they rely very much on the government's line on this.

Alie Ward
And as a little background on this. For 160 years, canadian policies forced First nations children into residential schools, separating them from their families and cultures, and killing roughly 6000 indigenous children. As we discussed in the indigenous phytology episode with Doctor Lee Joseph. Now, the last residential school finally closed in 1996. And in 2022, the canadian government finally recognized these acts as genocide, which is historical progress, like finally an admission of a genocide.

It took 200 years for that. But don't feel too misty about this kind of meager act. Our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, helped produce and research and encourage this episode. For the last few months we've been working on. And she notes that as a Canadian, for her it's very frustrating to see, because very few of Canada's National Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action in regard to child welfare and education and health, justice, language and actual reconciliation have actually happened.

And mostly it's just acknowledging or appointing someone to think about a problem. But there have been virtually no material or policy changes. So that's a government acknowledging a genocide, which is different from a conviction. Okay, so that's one context, a very political one. The other is these legal tribunals.

Dirk Moses
And I've mentioned two. One is the international Court of Justice, where states sue each other. It's a UN court. The other is the international criminal court, where states aren't placed on trial, but individuals. So the people who were prosecuted, who are being prosecuted by the International criminal Court and by these two tribunals.

So they're the prosecutors, are given evidence about the conduct of particular individuals, usually government officials or military personnel, and then they try to piece together a case, and then they make a judgment. Can we get genocide across the line, or should we prosecute them for war crimes and war crimes against humanity? Either way, if they're successful, they're locking them up for decades, if not forever. Okay, but they just make a strategic decision, as I said, like a district attorney, about which crimes best fits the facts. So it's very context dependent and often a.

Quite a political decision that's, well, as a legal one. But, you know, it's difficult to say in a sort of a fundamental way or absolute way. You know, such and such genocide has been universally recognized by somebody as existing. Now the exception is probably the Holocaust, because there is a UN mandate Holocaust memorial day in late January. So mark your calendars for January 27, which is the anniversary of the closing of the Auschwitz concentration camp after liberation from the soviet army.

Alie Ward
So it's a day to remember the 6 million jewish Holocaust victims. And the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says that it can be commemorated by lighting candles, reading off victims names, and confronting anti semitism. And any hate we encounter in daily life. Now, are all genocides a holocaust of sorts? I wasn't sure about that.

In a word, no. So the etymology of Holocaust, first off, it comes from the Greek for burnt offering or an animal sacrifice. And the term the Holocaust capital t, capital h, refers just to the attempted extermination of european Jews. That is the Holocaust. Now, April 24 is armenian genocide Remembrance Day, which in Los Angeles, where I live, features a lot of armenian flags on buildings and cars and gathering and a lot of awareness raising for that, April 7 has been designated by UNESCO, which is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, as International Day of Reflection on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

So different tragedies have different distinctions, but not all victims have days of remembrance yet. And UNESCO has a whole project and program of raising consciousness about that which I think is a good thing, but that's the exception rather than the rule, because just say this is something I was teaching in my genocide class today. We referred to the East Pakistan Liberation war, secessionist war in 1971, where Bangladesh emerges from the ashes of what was then East Pakistan, are unsure about the death toll, but it ranges from half a million to 3 million. Now, of course, the bangladeshi state is adamant that this is a genocide as a claim at the time in 1971, and this should be universally recognized. But of course, the state of Pakistan vehemently opposes that, so it becomes a huge diplomatic question, and so it's therefore difficult to settle on it.

So genocide, from a legal and a punitive standpoint, is very difficult to prove, no matter what the civilian toll or the horrors. Now, if it's hard to prosecute, then is there ever even a consequence or a deterrent? And you mentioned, locked away for decades, possibly forever. Is there a very different punishment or reparations? Why would a country that is already say committing atrocities or has committed atrocities want to avoid that label if they did the things that they did?

Dirk Moses
Yeah, it's a good question. So when the Darfur case was raging 20 years ago, which is a region in Sudan and was widely regarded as genocide here, particularly in the US, the UN sent in an investigative committee or commission, and it said that crimes against humanity were being committed but not genocide. And there was an audible sigh of relief in the African Union, saying, well, okay, nothing to see here. It's not genocide. It's just crimes against humanity.

And I was appalled by that. And it was one of the impetuses to write this book about what I call the problems of genocide. Why is that considered a win? Crimes against humanity is one of the most serious international crimes. So clearly, there's this stigmatic aura that attends to genocide because it is somehow relatable.

Back to the Holocaust, because the Holocaust stands as its archetype or ideal type. It's the textbook case of genocide. So if you're saying that something's genocidal, you're saying that it also has somehow. Somehow a relationship or resemblance to the Holocaust. And again, the Holocaust refers to the nearly 6 million jewish victims targeted for their religion and identity in an effort to eliminate them.

Alie Ward
But also during world War Two, the Nazis killed 4.5 million soviet prisoners of war and 1.8 million polish people. The Nazis killed 300,000 Serbs, 300,000 disabled people, up to a half million Romani people, plus Freemasons, Slovenians, and up to. 15,000 LGBTQ plus people. Jehovah's witnesses were also killed for the religion. But the Holocaust again refers to that attempt at elimination that is fundamental to Lemkin initial and to the modern definition of genocide that's been debated in and out of courts for decades since its conception.

Dirk Moses
And no state wants that. Given that the Holocaust is universally reviled as, you know, the largest genocide in world history. I mean, which state wants to have that on their books to block their copybook? You know, that's one reason that Turkey vehemently disputes the armenian case that there's genocide. And if you look at the, the government apologetic statements on it, they say, you know, that the Nazis committed a genocide.

We didn't do anything like the Nazis. There was a civil war going on or civil disturbances going on during the first World War when the allies invaded, including Australians in 1915, April. And we were just putting down. And Rebecca, I mean, that's usually, that's the rationale by state. What they don't say is how they put down the rebellion states.

You have a right to maintain law and order, especially during military conflict. That doesn't mean you can't deport the entire population and murder its political leaders. In other words, this excess, which I call permanent security is clearly illegal. And I think that's really what the logic which drives what we call genocide. And in his book, Dirk explores the ills of this so called permanent security which he explains is, quote, the striving of states and armed groups seeking to found states to make themselves invulnerable to threats.

Alie Ward
Permanent security is the unobtainable goal of absolute safety that necessarily results in civilian casualties by its paranoid tendency to indiscriminate violence. And he writes, quite simply, permanent security should be illegal. Now, in working on this episode, I happened to take a break to visit the cinema and see the film movie doom two. And when the pasty bad guys, the Harkonnen, call their oppressed enemies the Fremen rats and bellow to kill them all. It made me think back to all the genocidal rhetoric through time that calls for annihilation of certain groups of people the wiping away of indigenous populations to make room for colonizers the use of language like animals or barbarians and this intent to wipe nations out of existence.

Now, if the Harkonnen were ever tried in the International Court of Justice statements like rats would be dehumanization and kill them all would be intent to destroy those would make it into evidence. But when is it self defense? And I know that the language of transgression obviously very huge theme of the book and how things are defined. And I understand that one look of genocide is that it's asymmetrical, that it's really against one group with the intent to eliminate them from a group that's in power. Where do the lines blur when something is seen as retaliatory or it's a retaliation for colonization?

Mercedes Maitland
When you go far back, there are so many religious divisions and land disputes and resource disputes. How far back does it go to decide who is at fault? And I'm curious about this. In one of the earlier genocides in South Africa in 1904, where that was an uprising against german colonists, and obviously. In so many conflicts.

So where does that retaliation come in? Okay, so you're really pointing to the explanatory nexus, you know, what causes mass violence against civilians. And in the case of german southwest Africa, which is now Namibia, before the first world war, which was governed by Germany, you're quite right, there was an uprising by the Herero and Nama, who were responding to the crisis of their society caused by the terms of german exploitation and rule and so forth. It's inevitable. You know, if you occupy and exploit the people in a colonial context, it will be often a violent reaction.

Dirk Moses
That doesn't make it right. And especially, they did attack some german farmers. But this is sort of, if you like, a law of history. And once again, we need to separate normative from analytical points. Why do these things happen?

Alie Ward
And in that case, when indigenous populations in what is now Namibia rebelled against occupation and killed around 100 german settlers, it sparked retaliatory genocide that killed somewhere between 35 and 100,000 southwest Africans via starvation and dehydration, from being driven to the desert without access to food and water. And thousands of others were sent to concentration camps to die of disease and injuries inflicted by german forces. Now, this incident is now known as the first genocide of the 20th century. And it wasn't until over 100 years later that Germany issued a statement of apology, saying that it, quote, bows before the descendants of the victims, asking for forgiveness for the sins of our forefathers. It is not possible to undo what has been done, but the suffering, inhumanity, and pain inflicted on the tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children by Germany during the war in what is today Namibia must not be forgotten.

It must serve as a warning against racism and genocide, they wrote. Now, remember, in 1977, new protocol was added to those Geneva conventions which addressed wars of national liberation and what can't be considered a legitimate target of military attack. So it prohibits indiscriminate attacks or reprisals directed against the civilian population, civilian objects, objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population and places of worship and the natural environment. So reprisals for uprisings within a territory or against occupiers of territories are considered international. Now, the Geneva Convention's 1977 protocol notes that violations of these prohibitions can be considered grave breaches of humanitarian law and classified as war crimes.

So one army war of national liberation or revolution might be called a rebellion or guerrilla warfare or an insurgency by occupiers. So where you are literally standing greatly influences where you stand. And we're talking here about colonial contexts. Observing this, we can see that indeed, the mass violence against civilians is triggered by colonial occupations, often whether within Europe or outside Europe, as you had them in Europe as well, you had empires and occupations. So it's not just outside Europe, and then you have the resistance to that, and then you have this excessive reprisals by the occupier.

Dirk Moses
This is what was noted by Bartolome las Casas, the famous spanish priest in the 16th century, who wrote these celebrated pamphlets criticizing the terms of the conquistadors conquest of of the Americas, the so called New World, which started this praxis in Europe of criticizing excesses of state power, particularly in these occupation contexts. In any event, Las Casas pamphlets became sort of a core celebre around Europe and translated into many languages, and then illustrated with these graphic images of murdering and exploiting natives, as it were, were of Latin America and South America, and commenced a style of critiquing state power. One of the terms that Las Casas uses, and then we use to the present day, is events which sort of, quote unquote, shock the conscience of mankind, you know, that which shocks us. He would then, in graphic detail, list the things that the Spanish did. Okay, so the english translation of the Spanish Catholic La Casa's writings includes scathing passages such as this one.

Alie Ward
He wrote to the king, if your highness had been informed of even a few of the excesses which this new world has witnessed, your highness would not have delayed for even one moment to prevent any repetition of the atrocities which go under the name of conquests. Given that the indigenous peoples of the region are naturally so gentle, so peace loving, so humble and so docile, these excesses are of themselves iniquitous, tyrannical, contrary to natural canon and civil law, and are deemed wicked and are condemned by all such legal codes. I therefore concluded that it would constitute a criminal neglect of my duty to remain silent about the enormous loss of life, as well as the infinite number of human souls dispatched to hell in the course of such conquests. Again, this was in the 15 hundreds. La Casa continues, that on the mainland we know for sure that our fellow countrymen have, through their cruelty and wickedness, depopulated and laid waste an area once teeming with human beings.

At a conservative estimate, he writes, the diabolical behavior of the Christians has, over the last 40 years, led to the unjust and totally unwarranted deaths of more than 12 million souls, women and children among them. And there are grounds for believing, my own estimate, of more than 15 million, to be nearer to the mark. There are two main ways in which those who have traveled to this part of the world pretending to be, have uprooted these pitiful peoples and wiped them from the face of the earth. First, they have waged war on them, unjust, cruel, bloody, and tenrical war. Second, they have murdered anyone and everyone who is shown the slightest sign of resistance, or even of wishing to escape the torment to which they have subjected him.

So La Casa's pamphlets decrying slaughters done in the name of his religion spread and awakened people worldwide. And this style of writing resurfaces for hundreds of years to highlight injustices of forced labor and slavery and brutality against workers. And Dirk uses the example of the 1890s, Belgian Congo's labor exploitation on rubber plantations, cutting off the hands of workers who didn't produce enough, and the writings that came in response to that. And I know right now we're like Lycosas. I want to stan him, but just a little more on his background.

Earlier in his life, he was an owner of slaves, and though he was an advocate for indigenous rights, he remained okay with enslavement of african peoples if their acquisition was the result of a legitimate conquest of war. So as far as a 16th century ally goes, he was not unproblematic, but jumping ahead. So what Lincoln did in the 1930s and forties is come out of that tradition. He himself referred to Las Casas in his own writing and placed himself in that, if you like, humanitarian tradition. Now, that didn't mean they were against empires, okay?

Dirk Moses
It was still very eurocentric. But, you know, let's not massacre the natives if we're going to employ them, let's do so on humane terms. But no one contested in Europe that Europeans had a right to be there because there was a right to engage in trade and commerce, friendship, as they even called it, and try to convert people. So Lepkin wrote about the latin american case. He called it spanish american genocide.

And I actually wrote an article based on these unpublished papers with a colleague in Sydney, Mike McDonald, who's an expert on colonial America. Lemkin understood that the mechanism for violence was the arrogation of the Spanish, that they had a right to be there and a right to take the land and to exploit these people, and that, you know, naturally there was resistance on the part of the. I'll call them the Indians, for want of a better word. And of course, anyone who is not should defer to indigenous native aboriginal individual nations or confederacies. As to preferred terminology.

Alie Ward
From a legal standpoint, in the United States and Canada, at least, the term Indian is still in legal framework, like the US Department of the Interiors Bureau of Indian affairs, which just further illustrates the lag in the law to catching up to actual lived experience. Yeah, but there are so many historical instances of uprising against occupation or colonization resulting in what legal scholars may deem asymmetrical military reproach. The massive violence came in the retaliation. He traced a similar pattern, and I think that's largely right. So, for example, in the case of german southwest Africa, you mentioned from 1904 to 1907, there was a colonial occupation as it was destroying indigenous society.

Dirk Moses
There was then a resistance to that. And this resistance isn't always very nice. It can attack the settlers and not just soldiers. Right. Civilians and combatants are kind of conflated because from the perspective of the colonized, the families of the settlers are as dangerous as the soldiers because they're replacing us.

They're having children, etcetera. I mean, it's a terrible logic of demographic warfare, but that's what settler colonialism represents. It brings the logic of demographic warfare into these societies. Because settler colonialism isn't just about exploitation, it's about replacing one society with another. So one demographic replacing another, as was the case of aboriginal population and the australian colony or north american colonization.

Alie Ward
But in, say, colonial India, there wasn't necessarily a strategy to replace the existing population, just to exploit them for resources and labor. But Dirk says what's distinct about the genocide of the Holocaust is that Jews. Of Europe were not engaged in a rebellion against nazi rule or against any white rule. Right. There was no, if you like, combative nexus.

Dirk Moses
I mean, after they were attacked, Jews joined partisan groups and others in the forests of Russia, but only after the assault by the Nazis. I mean, there you have this curious temporal lapse because the Nazis, along with many right wing Germans, regarded the loss of the First World War. So in 1917, 1819, when the home front collapsed with the strikes and so forth, and the labour unreasonable as the result of pacifists, liberals, socialists, who they affiliated with, quote unquote, jewish power. So it's a highly anti semitic imaginary. So when the Nazis got to power in 1933, they said, we're not going to let that happen again.

So we're going to round up the people who betrayed us at the end of the First World War, leftists and Jews. And when they then attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, which they regarded as a jewish power, as they thought Bolshevism was effectively a jewish movement, if you like. And in case you'd be in a panic as a jeopardy contestant, the clue would be a far left faction of the marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, established by Vladimir Lenin and renamed the Russian Communist Party in 1918. And the question answer would be, what were the Bolsheviks? And they weren't the only ones.

So did many westerners, Roosevelt, Churchill. They all thought somehow the Bolsheviks were jewish. I know it sounds weird today, but that's how people ticked in those days. So the nazi logic was to be preemptive. We need to round up, lock up and murder people before they can become dangerous.

And what I learned from that is that in the minds of the perpetrator, which you really need to understand for genocide, because it's a crime of intention, you need to get in their head and understand what they think they're doing. Crazy and delusional and paranoid as it may be now, that doesn't justify any of it. You know, you have to try to understand. They really believed that Jews are military danger because they would join with the Bolsheviks or they would engage in sabotage and so forth. And at least that was their pretext, and it was preemptive.

And so the they justified the killing of women and children and so forth as a preemptive measure before they can produce more children, who would eventually become opponents to our regime. Now, especially with the killing of children. I mean, such a terrible subject. It reminded me initially of what I'd seen in colonial american history, which is the nits make lice argument, which some of you may recall, that is on the american frontier. The same was in Australia.

You need to kill native children before they become warriors. And that way you annihilate possible resistance at its source. You know, root and branch, you rip out the roots. It's kind of botanical metaphors for very common and genocidal language. And the more I looked, the more I saw that kind of thinking as driving mass violence against civilians.

Alie Ward
Again, Harkonnens and wrath. That's dehumanization. Now, in his book, less than why we demean, enslave, and exterminate others, the author and philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith notes that victims of the Rwanda genocide were called cockroaches and vermin, Armenians were called dangerous microbes by the Ottoman Empire, and Nazis referred to Jews as subhumans and rats. Now, in the recent International Court of Justice case raised against Israel, a south african lawyer noted that the israeli defense minister in October of 2023 said they were fighting human animals and that the language of systematic dehumanization is evident in the israeli military strategies. But of course, on the other side, sources like the anti defamation League quotes a 2023 sermon by a Hamas official calling their opposition filthy, ugly animals like apes and pigs because of the injustice and evil they had brought about in regard to the occupied lands of Palestine.

But the Hamas 2017 charter makes note that it is in opposition to the israeli state and the occupation of Palestine, not the jewish people. And others point out the false equivalency of the state of Israel, a government body in a country and the nation of ethno religious people that live there now. Psychiatrist and philosopher Franz Fannin, author of the 1961 book the Wretched of the earth, wrote extensively on this subject of dehumanization, saying that colonial rule is itself the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native. And he wrote that in order to justify the violence required of colonialism, a notion of inferiority has to be projected onto colonial subjects. And Fannin wrote that those oppressed by colonialism become so dehumanized that attempts at defense, quote, turns him into an animal.

One might argue that dehumanization is a core tool in getting people to kill others out of fear or defense or greed. Now, in international law, genocide is a complex case of intent, power, and oppression. What is so disconcerting or confusing in all this is that the Holocaust, being the archetype of genocide, is a case where the victims were passive. Now they weren't engaged in a rebellion, and that becomes the archetype for genocide. And so people since the war, wanting to claim that they're victims of genocide, tend to shoehorn these complex military circumstances into this simple binary of victim and perpetrator, where the victims utterly pass away, which distorts a reality.

Dirk Moses
For example, in the case of East Pakistan that I mentioned, there was an independence movement in East Pakistan, and there was an insurgency, and then there was a counterinsurgency. Now there was actually a preemptive counterinsurgency by the Pakistan government. The bangladeshi resistance movement, independence movement was real. The pakistani government targeted this resistance movement first and foremost, the leaders and students who were nationalists and so forth. And then they went down and preemptively attacked males who could be possibly in the resistance forces.

And hundreds of thousands of women are raped. So this is seen as genocide by the Bangladeshis. But, you know, the Pakistanis say, well, this is just a side effect of armed conflict and it doesn't really resemble the holocaust. It is very different. And yet it's also true that that lots of innocent civilians died because of the excesses of the pakistani state.

So the genocide concept is a very ambivalent or ambiguous concept that we've inherited from the end of the second world war. And it really confuses and distorts the way we understand armed conflict and the way that civilians are attacked for it. In all, it's hard to define. The concept of genocide is a very historically situated and contingent. It doesn't necessarily mean a stable fact in world history.

These circumstances vary greatly and then it omits many cases that we really should be thinking about if we're interested in mass casualty events. I mean, what was the largest civilian mass casualty event after the Second World War? It was probably the great leap Forward in China, where historians talk about over 40 million people dying between 1950 819 62. The forced modernization and collectivization of agriculture. Now, I was unaware of this, but he's referring to the late 1950s, early 1960s economic campaign by the Chinese Communist Party that sought to gather agriculture from farms and redistribute it.

Alie Ward
But due to many, many factors and blunders and exaggerated projections of what that increase in agricultural labor could return, there actually wasn't enough for people to. But leaders weren't keen to admit that. And what resulted was this tragic and staggering and preventable and so called man made famine. One scholarly publication estimates that 30 million chinese people starved to death and about the same number of births were lost or postponed. Genocide's not the right word for that.

Dirk Moses
Right. The government of China, the communist party, did not intend to go out and kill 40 million of its civilians or citizens, but when it found out about the mortality, nor did it stop. This was a price that needed to be paid for the modernization of China and for the elimination of any counter revolutionary elements and for the collectivization of agriculture. So if international law were to properly categorize these kinds of crimes, we'd need different concepts and different halls. Again, the legal designation of the crime of genocide can only be applied where there's there is intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, and identifying intent is a huge factor in prosecuting and hopefully preventing future genocides.

Alie Ward
Now, when I posted this episode to patrons@patreon.com ologies, I was in the middle of recovering from some difficult medical stuff. You can see my March Field trip episode on my mystery surgery, but I asked then if there was interest in covering this scholarly field of genocide, and I got a lot of great feedback, almost all encouraging. Brianna L. Said, this is such an important topic to cover. Adam Foot said, my grandmother survived the Holocaust, so I'm extremely interested in an episode on this topic.

Annie G. Says, I'm interested in this episode and not just because I'm an armenian American. Corinne L. Said, I would love to hear what your expert has to say. I've been hoping you would do this one since October.

Thank you. And Steph B. Having read through a lot of the questions that you all submitted, said, I'm just amazed at the depth of questions on here. I took a course in college that was all about Hitler's rise to power and to this day think that should have been a required humanities class. So many people really don't know or understand how much genocide occurs in the world, and education on the topic is much needed.

And I'm really doing my best to give you the history and the context to understand what we talk about when we talk about genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. And you had great questions, so we're going to get to those that you submitted in a moment. But first, just a quick break. And before that, every episode we donate to a cause of the ologist's choosing. And this week, Doctor Moses asked that it go toward student support at the Colin Powell School of the City College of New York because he says many of his students are first generation college students and that even the low fees at City College are unaffordable for them.

But they have a financial aid program, so we will make a donation to that for this episode. So thank you to listeners and sponsors of the show who make that possible. What do you get for the mom who burst you into the world? I know, a candle. Are you like, no, that's not quite enough.

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Alie Ward
That's 20% off your summer adventure at kiwico.com ologies summer. Oh. Have fun. Okay, onto your questions now. As I mentioned earlier, our lead editor, Mercedes, she's been a listener and a patron before she became our editor, but she encouraged and produced and did amazing additional deep research for this episode.

So huge thanks to her for that passion and that hard work. And when we recorded, I invited her to be on the call. First one. I'd love to open the mic to Mercedes. I know that you were really passionate about this episode and have a question, too, so you'd love to toss in there.

Mercedes Maitland
Yeah, what's on my mind, what I've wondered is what is the role of cultural narratives around in groups and out groups and the way that people see themselves in their group's history and understand their worldview? How do those sort of identities and narratives form into support from civilians in seeing mass casualties of other civilians that they see themselves as other other, yeah. I'm glad you asked that question because it allows me to talk about the processes of what we call racialization in the literature and whether they are at the basis of genocidal violence. Sometimes these are called discourses of dehumanization. This might be what you're getting at.

Dirk Moses
And once again, they're context specific because, you know, what one group, say, majority population thinks about a particular minority, will be very different in one country than in another, depending on religious affiliation and difference and so forth. So I think that racialization, which leads ultimately to, if you like, racial hatred or ethnic hatred, national hatred, is not enough to explain why mass violence takes place. So diversity isn't the problem. The fact of cultural religious difference is a staple in world history. Think of the Ottoman Empire.

So this was the largely muslim empire, governed from what is now Turkey, that spread through southern Europe and across North Africa and the Middle east for hundreds of years until the end of the First World War, and was a highly successful empire in many ways. Although it was in decline during the 19th century, it had millions, millions of christian subjects when it occupied what is today the Balkan. So Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and so forth, Bulgaria, which is why you have bosnian Muslims. Okay, so they're Muslims so far into Europe. Now, these groups which, you know, had differences among themselves, you have different Christians, you have Armenians, you have Assyrians, you had greek Orthodox Christians.

So there's a lot of differentiation, as well as Jews and different kinds of Muslims, you know, living more or less in harmony by the standards of the time. Okay? And people respected each other's differences. There wasn't much into marriage, but there was a lot of sociability attending each other's weddings, especially in mixed villages and towns, respecting each other's religious shrines, which were often shared because of their monotheistic religions. Right?

So there was a, you know, this wasn't necessarily springtime for everybody. And there were hierarchies, right? This was the islamic empire. Christians that weren't going to serve in the army, they had to pay an extra tax and were a lower social status. But, you know, Christians also participated in the governance and were often very high officials.

So it was in some ways a very porous empire, hierarchically, too. I mean, that's why historians are fascinated by it and write about it. So, historically, there have been many religious groups living in a state of somewhat harmony, a collective of different backgrounds and beliefs. Now, when does this complex culture or civilization become murderous? It's when you combine the difference that people recognize, which does come with prejudices and so forth, with a sense that this group is a threat.

You know, when is a group considered a security threat? Not just that the group is different because, you know, a group can be different. You may not like them, but that doesn't mean you kill them, okay? You can just be socially superior to them, you can exploit them, you can dominate them, but it's not a logic of destruction. When do you want to destroy them?

It's when groups are considered a threat, and that is usually during or immediately before an international conflict or a civil war. And the group is seen as a ally of the external enemy. So a friend of your enemy becomes your enemy. And according to the UN framework of Analysis, for atrocity crimes, other risk factors include weakness of state structures, the military capacity to commit atrocity crimes, triggering factors, inner group tensions, or patterns of discrimination against protected groups. Signs of an intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group, serious threats to those protected under international humanitarian law, and serious threats to humanitarian or peacekeeping operations.

Now, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, Armenians were striving for an autonomous region within what is now Turkey, where they were large in number but never a majority. And the ottoman government resisted this, obviously. But christian powers like France, Britain and Russia sponsored the Armenian striving and acted as an external protector. So in the early 19 hundreds leading up to World War one, armenian separatists were backed by big players who were a threat to the Ottoman Empire. And this, in the minds of the ottoman elite, made Armenians an international threat as a representative of these foreign powers that want to dismember our empire.

And this culminated in the genocide during the first World War, when radicals within the ottoman state said, the war allows us cover to deal with this armenian problem once and for all, because once we get rid of them, then never again can we have separatist tendencies. Dirk says that he's observed this in the case of the Myanmar military's expulsions of Rohingya Muslims, 700,000 of whom were forced to leave in 2017 so that separatists movements wouldn't recur. But humanitarian law, for example, the fourth Geneva Convention, recognizes that displaced persons have what's called a right of return, and if they've been evacuated, they can return to their homeland. And in his book the Problems of Genocide, Dirk notes that, quote, while arab governments successfully insisted that the right to return to his country be included in article 13 during the UN declaration of Human Rights in December of 1948, he writes, it came a year too late for Palestinians, as conflict over the establishment of Israel during the 1948 Palestine war saw over 700,000 Arabs from Palestine expelled or forced to flee their homes during the establishment of the state of Israel. And Dirk writes that, quote, despite the UN General Assembly's resolution of 1948, the return of palestinian refugees has no standing in international law and has proven impotent.

Alie Ward
It also made any return contingent upon the refugees acceptance of the new state of Israel. In 1949, the UN recognized Israel as a state, but not Palestine. And today it's estimated that 70% of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees from what is now land settled by Israel. Now, a second great exodus occurred during the 1967 Middle east war, which is also called the Six Day War, the June War, the setback, the 1967 arab israeli war, or the third arab israeli war. Either way, several hundred thousand Palestinians were displaced and fled further into Jordan, Egypt and Syria.

Now, in 1978, the UN published the right of return of the palestinian people, noting that the majority of the Palestinians have been, quote, in exile, unable to return to their country, despite the right of those wishing to return to their homes. Now, on the other side is Zionism, which comes from the hebrew word for an area in Jerusalem. And this has been a movement pursuing a jewish state on lands that are historically linked to Judaism thousands of years ago. Now, following the genocide of the Holocaust. Britain, which controlled the lands of what is now Israel and Palestine, endorsed the formation of Israel.

However, initial agreements of what land would be an arab state and what would be a jewish state have not been observed or have changed after military conflict. Now, one point of massive contention is what some people call a false equivalency between Zionism, which is nationalist support for the state of Israel, and Judaism as a religion and a culture, with some equating being critical of the zionist movement or israeli military policy as being anti jewish. Now, this confusion or bias has led to incidents of anti Semitism, but has also been confusing for those trying to understand the separation between state like Israel and a nation like jewish people, which some argue are one and the same, and others say are two different things entirely. There has been vocal support of Palestine by jewish protesters or during demonstrations that stress that criticism of israeli military action is not directed at the jewish community, but the state of Israel itself. Of course, as you know, debates rage on.

But again, throughout history and across the planet, Dirk said says that in conflict between states and civilians, governments have sought to quell uprisings, and it's led to humanitarian rights violations. Rather than say, just arrest them, let's expel the entire population, or most of it, through murderous burning of villages and terrorism. And that way, we will never have a separatist problem again. So expulsion is one mode of dealing with this perceived security crisis, which states experience is existential, like it affects the integrity of their borders. Another version is mass incarceration.

Dirk mentions a 2011 separatist attack by a uyghur muslim group against han chinese residents in a border state of China that involved the fatal stabbings of six people with another 27 injured. They used that as a pretext to lock up about a million people for, quote, unquote, re education purposes, to de islamicize this population and to exploit their labor. People eventually get out of these prison complex, but are then heavily surveilled as the chinese state has the capacity to do that in order to destroy the sense of community coherence, which could be the basis of a separatist claim. Now, this is not a powerful movement, but it's enough to establish a pretext for the chinese security services to crackdown on the entire population, which means you are attacking uninvolved, innocent civilians. And, you know, this is clearly criminal behavior.

Dirk Moses
In a broader sense, though, it's very difficult to prosecute a state for crimes it commits against its own civilians. Right? Not an international situation. And leaving that aside, what about the political question of like, how do you really squeeze a great power like China? It's in the Security Council, let alone Russia.

This is the real problem in the international system, is that when great powers or the members of the Security Council are directly involved or their clients, then the possibility of prosecution breaks down. And side note, there are 193 UN assembly members, but the UN Security Council is composed of just 15. Five of them are permanent. China, France, Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. The other ten are non permanent members, and they include five for african and asian states, one eastern european state, two latin american or caribbean states, and two western european or other states.

Alie Ward
And so let's say that one of those five permanent members, China, France, russian federation, the UK or the US wanted to say, exercise its veto power. It could smother some issues that the rest of the UN assembly or the UN Security Council is trying to address. And since 1967, the US has used its veto power almost exactly as many times as the other four permanent members combined. So if you're allies with the US or other permanent UN Security Council members, you've got friends in high places. Now, I've gone very much off tangent, Mercedes, but I think the takeaway for the listeners is that you need two processes.

Dirk Moses
Need racialization and securitization and securitization. So when groups are seen as a threat comes usually when borders are considered permeable. And a lot of people wanted to. Know, namely Patricia Evans, Zoe Litton, the awkward cactus, Min, Doctor Wiggles, Erin Everton, Becky the sassy seagrass scientist, and Annabelle. How long do you think humans have been like this?

Mercedes Maitland
How long have humans been trying to eliminate others based on identity? Well, they're based on identity linked to political threats. So people have lived in mixed communities since time immemorial, not just in little tribes, but in bigger civilizations. Diversity is actually the norman global history. The exception is this period of modern nation states when they're conceived of as large tribes or families.

Dirk Moses
Germany for the Germans, where everybody's white, white and blonde hair and so forth. Right? Now, these were projects from the middle of the 19th century roughly onwards, which tried to fashion a homogeneity out of heterogeneity, because in fact, these societies were very diverse. In order to make something homogeneous, states need to intervene. To kick people out.

You need to sift and filter the population. So the power of the modern state is very elemental here. And that states didn't have that kind of power until the last 200 years or so, until the middle of the 19th century in european states and the Ottoman Empire. They didn't even keep a census. People didn't have these formalized names and so forth.

So that's something we need to bear in mind historically. Now there are people who think that there's a death drive. Thanatos. There's something anthropological about the way humans interact, which can culminate in genocide. So death drive is this itch that is scratched with aggression or self destruction as a release of tension through killing or chaos, because humans, technically speaking, are animals.

Alie Ward
But is that why humans destroy each other? Well, no doubt communities large and small will hunker down into offensive crouch if they think they're threatened. But, you know, it's one thing to engage in vigilance, that all states, like humans, have a right to be vigilant. It's quite natural if someone walks across the street and tries to strike you, you know, you put your hand up to defend yourself. What you get with genocidal violence is something I would associate with hypervigilance, which the psychologists talk about.

Dirk Moses
And that's when you're looking for people, you're anticipating people who might harm you, and you act preemptively. You go across the street and attack the person who you thought might be about to attack you. And with genocides, I'm seeing that. And that's why there's this temporal slippage. You know, you're attacking.

Attacking an entire group today to make sure they can't be threatening in the future. You got that in the Holocaust. You got that with this? Nits make lice logic and colonial warfare. I mentioned.

You get that with the Myanmar case of the Rohingya. Let's expel murderously the entire population so that never again will there be a secessionist threat. And doing so means we're attacking innocent Sabini people who had no direct connection to the. To the secessionist separatist attempts. This potential, I think, is embedded in the fact that we live in states.

States have borders, states have bureaucratic and security apparatuses. And self preservation is a natural right of states, like it is of human beings. And we're talking about the security and military apparatus of the state, which is, in a sense, always looking for threats. That's their job, right? Think that the state is threatened.

They will engage in all manner of nefarious activities, legal and illegal optimism, to deal with that threat, whether it's a series of individuals or a neighbor or a social or political movement within its border. And we social scientists get very nervous when we see excessive threat perceptions circulating, say, in the media or emanating from important politicians who are saying such and such people are a mortal danger to our society. Because, you know, not everybody is in a position to think about these things rationally. People are easily scared and think, oh, my God, these people streaming across the border in any given country are threatening our way of life, or they're rapists or what have you, criminals or insurgents. So let's round them all up, put them in camps or send them back or what have you.

You know, some drastic security measure, not always will it amount to genocide, like incarcerating entire groups, like, for example, Japanese Americans during the second World War. It's not genocide, right, but it's clearly a human rights violation. You know, and there've been apologies, quite rightly, issued since then. And as a side note, during World War two, the United States incarcerated at least 125 people of japanese descent. And estimates are that two thirds of them were us citizens put into internment camps simply because of racial hysteria about their ancestry.

Alie Ward
Many of these people were on the west coast, Washington, Oregon, California. And y'all know I love the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. It's like a second home to me. And one exhibit is called Becoming Los Angeles. And among the artifacts are several trunks used as luggage by these forcibly removed japanese citizens.

And the NHM notes that the trunks, quote, confront visitors with something familiar, packed luggage to make forced relocation more of an understandable reality. What possessions would you bring knowing that you might never see home or the rest of your belongings again? It continues. The luggage emotionally anchors the story of the Japanese Angelinos forcibly removed from their homes and relocated again against their will, without trial or charges. The day of remembrance for these relocations is on February 19.

Also recently, my friend Dalynn Rodriguez told me about repatriation drives during the Great Depression, during which up to 1.8 million people were deported so as to open up more jobs to non minority people or white people? One researcher estimates that about 60% of those deported to Mexico during the Great Depression were american citizens simply because of race. So these things happen, and they get buried in the history or buried in the news while we focus on the Oscars or the Super bowl or the Met gala, or depending on who's telling the story, they get minimized, or even worse, they get normalized. So one of the problems of this fixation on genocide is you detract attention from the driver of all, you know, which leads to these kind of policies and understand genocide as part of the continuum of repressive policies by state when it's dealing with perceived threats. And one aspect of your book, a huge aspect of your work that I think is really fascinating is that this quest to prove or to label something as genocide can cause harm in that it almost ignores these mass atrocities that might slip through those cracks.

What do we do, listeners? Pistachiche Ken, Rachel Gentile, Kate Tims, Brian Shart, Tiger Yuri, Kathryn Napenski, Matt Cicado, Marianne Thomas, Jennifer Langford, April Carter. All wanted to know, what can we do to prevent or to stop it? And first time question Asker Atlas asked how we can systematically transform the conditions that might lead to further genocides in the future. And I'm wondering now that people have cellphones, now that media is so quick, we're becoming more and more aware of things in real time and the actual horrors, especially to civilians.

Mercedes Maitland
From an international standpoint, what should our response be? What should our actions be? I know the prevention of genocide is something that has also been really sticky and you've written on that. But we're seeing this debate of is this genocide? Is this not, does it matter?

What do we do? So this allows us to pivot very much to the present day and observe what's happening on the streets of the US, Australia, around the world, which are mass protests for ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages. I think that's sometimes not mentioned, but I think that's intended as well. So, yes, demonstrations both call for the releases of the hostages taken by palestinian militant group Hamas during the brutal attacks on October 7 that killed over 1100 people. But in recent weeks especially, we've seen a rise in protests on college campuses calling for a permanent ceasefire in the region as the death toll in Gaza has reached over 34,000 people, including more than 14,000 children, with another 8000 people missing.

Alie Ward
And in the last week, clashes have erupted between counter protesters to pro palestinian protests with serious injuries and thousands of for occupation of campus property. So the global question is when is force or defense or opposition deemed justified? There are so many dimensions here. One is the case by South Africa in the International Court of Justice against Israel accusing it of genocide. Then these interim measures or provisional measures which are issued by the court, which have been largely ignored by Israel.

Dirk Moses
And then the mass protests movement, which is putting pressure on the Biden administration because they might lose the state of Michigan, an important swing state in the upcoming election. So you can see there are sort of many different spheres here. One is legal, one is domestic political and so forth. And then there's the issue of international reputation. You know, no state wants to be accused of genocide let alone be hauled before an international court, and especially not Israel, you know, which understandably argues that, look, you know, the genocide convention exists because of what happened to Jews during.

Alie Ward
The Second World War and a reminder that historically charges of genocide typically take years to litigate. Meanwhile, conflicts continue, oftentimes despite provisional measures from international humanitarian tribunals and courts. Does it even make a difference? Is the big question. Now, I'm not going to get into the rights and wrongs of the genocide claim here that it's before the International Court of Justice.

Dirk Moses
As a social scientist, I'm interested in the politics of all this. The fact that the claim of genocide has become an article of faith in Palestine advocacy circles, because I experienced this firsthand. If you'll seem to question that, we'll say things are complicated, though not denying any of the conduct by Israel, which I think international lawyers around the world see clearly, war crimes and maybe crimes against humanity, but people that can quibble about because the law is so quirky, then you're attacked as a genocide denier. I mean, this sort of absolutization of political rhetoric was of course, intended by Lemkin when he invented the term, because it wasn't just to prosecute genocide, it was also to prevent it, as you said, alan. So it's meant to be sounding the alarm.

I mean, people may say maybe alleging, look, you're crying wolf. This is not what a genocide. This is just a regular war with collateral damage, as it were. Unfortunate turn of phrase, but unintended consequences of bombing in a heavily urban area where the enemy is buried underneath it, this is not much Israel can do. This is the line of reasoning, this absolutization of the political rhetoric, which is then accused of being crying wolf.

Alie Ward
Another scholar who's weighed in on this is israeli genocide doctor Raz Siegel at Stockton University, who has said that despite, despite the inciting factor of the October 7 attack by Hamas, the counteroffensive by israeli defense forces and the blockade of humanitarian aid, water, power and fuel is, in his words, quote, a textbook case of genocide. And Siegel cites three acts, killing, causing serious bodily harm and measures calculated to bring about the destruction of the group as genocidal in intent. But I don't have to tell you that this topic is contentious. This was the point of the genocide convention. And that word, it was meant to catastrophize politics because it is a catastrophic situation, whatever you call it.

Dirk Moses
There's a mass slaughter going on of Palestinians, which is only going to get worse as the famine unfolds. And some experts like the program director at the World Food Program, have said that there is, in her words, a full blown famine spreading across Gaza. But declaring an official famine is a complex legal process which should come as little surprise by now and again. If one state supports the allegations of genocide against another, then that would set a legal precedent to re examine some of its own past or current military actions. And the effect of the rhetoric is now playing to see.

The american government is very nervous about the optics, is now sending an aid, whether by the air or this port, they're going to erect and construct on the coast criticism of the israeli government. Not that it's going to not ship arms to them, but, you know, it has changed the rhetoric of american policy. And I think many states in the United nations, and particularly in the global south, are convinced that this is genocide. That's easy to see from those that supported the south african case in the International Court of Justice. And this episode is not meant to be up to date reporting on this conflict.

Alie Ward
But on the eve of releasing this, Hamas has agreed to a ceasefire deal. But israeli airstrikes have hit Rafa in the southern part of Gaza, and humanitarian workers report that the flow of aid has been halted at the Gaza egyptian border. And I'm sure this will change by the time the episode is published in less than 24 hours. So this is not to inform you of world events up to the minute, but to give you some history and some context of the conflicts. So, obviously, this is a huge debate.

Around the world, and scholars of genocide are being called on to examine and compare current events to historical precedents. So the law is not a panacea like, international law is not going to change the conduct of states if they think they're sort of survival is at stake. And reading the statements of israeli leaders is clear that they do think their survival is at stake. So this conflict isn't going to go away. And the genocide rhetoric is one tool among many or one lever that, say, a protest movement can pull.

Dirk says that the issue of so many civilian casualties and the type of military campaigns being used is a different, different and more complex question. The crime of genocide is not so much about the how or the how many, but about the whys, the intent. Why is that happening? That's, in a sense, a broader problem or broader issue. And there we'd need another whole podcast with a sally.

Dirk Moses
Then there would be debates about occupation, the justice of occupation, the justice of resisting occupation, whether there's an occupation, settler colonialism, the right analysis here, or is that anti semitic you know, this is a whole other can of worms which we can't get into right now. But that is a conversation which is happening along with the genocide conversation. Now, what can people do? Now? Far be it for me to tell anyone what to do, because they.

People have very strong opinions on this one way or the other, particularly in the Middle east. If you are concerned about the armed conflict. Conflict about the civilian casualties, well, we can observe there's a very mobilised protest movement calling for a ceasefire. So this was recorded before the college campus demonstrations of the past few weeks started to gather momentum. So, you know, I would say these protest movements are having an effect somehow by changing the tone of political debate.

Even CNN is now focusing on the children who are being killed in Gaza. And once again, you notice that the emphasis on children, which is entirely legitimate and understandable, is interesting because they're depoliticized non combatants. But in fact, legally, men who are not in Hamas are as equally innocent under the Geneva conventions. Right. But that doesn't work in the way people imagine major injustice, that people are focused on women and children in particular.

That's why the gender aspect is always also fascinating as well as disturbing and all this. And there's also the aspect of sexual assault being used as a war crime or a crime of atrocity, although those statistics and claims have historically been overlooked or unverified. Now, two patrons had questions that were lingering in my own mind. Chicken chomper and first time question Asker, Miss Nowak, who wanted to know, is there any truth to the saying, quote, all wars have been started by men? Well, one of our listeners asked, which I think, as a woman, I'm definitely guilty of thinking this as well.

Alie Ward
Is. Is it men? Is it dudes, where is genocide coming from? Where's the gender aspect? Where is the aggression coming from?

Dirk Moses
This is a very important question. There are two elements to it. There is a feminist critique of statecraft which emphasizes, if you like, the toxic masculinity of this emphasis on revenge and retaliation, which you're getting from the israeli government and from Harvard, us, right? You kill our civilians, we'll kill your civilians. You terrorize us, we'll terrorize you.

Right? It's just trauma being acted out and playing out. And the trauma is real, mind you. I'm not trivializing that, but a feminist approach in the literature that I'm reading and what I've seen in talks by colleagues and so forth, is to try to channel that in another direction, not a violent one. Now, that doesn't mean you.

You give up on armed resistance from a palestinian and the perspective of other occupied peoples. Armed resistance is always an option, but that doesn't mean you kill their women and children. You know, you restrict it to combatants, which would be more consistent with international law. So fear breeds hate breeds fear, and continues, some would argue, in an ever increasing cycle of defense and trauma. So I think there is a plausible gender difference there.

However, that doesn't mean that women aren't participating individuals in genocidal rhetoric and policies. There's plenty of evidence for that. So you need to distinguish the agency of particular women who can participate in Rwanda as well, can participate in genocidal conduct from a gendered analysis where the kind of militarized politics we're seeing now is clearly very masculine and, in my view, brings out the worst. Everyone and women suffer terribly. And, you know, I know we've got to let you go.

Mercedes Maitland
Last questions I always ask. Typically I ask what sucks about your job, but given that you are a senior editor of a journal of Genocide, I imagine that there's a lot that presents a challenge. But how do you, as someone who studies this, how do you go on and do this every day, especially when so many people want to bury our heads in the sand and aren't acquainted to fathom the atrocities, how do you do this? Yeah, well, it's not easy. I mean, I want to first say I'm a very privileged operator, you know, a nice job at the city college of York where I had very good conditions, and I haven't had any immediate trauma of mass violence in my family.

Dirk Moses
So whereas some of my students have, who are mainly first generation students from the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, often migrant backgrounds. And, you know, the reason they're here is that their parents are escaping horrific, terrible conditions in other parts of the world. And I know, as they told me, because I'm teaching a class on genocide right now. That doesn't mean, though, that anyone, even in a relatively privileged position like mine, can't be vicariously affected by the material. Just by seeing on social media the everyday, the videos of children being blown to bits or buried under destroyed buildings, that does take its toll.

So you have to, I think, be careful about. Yeah, looking away because you will get intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, you know, the kind of classic symptoms of PTSD. I've experienced that in the past before, but this is something that can affect anyone. And in fact, what I observe with the, if you like, the catastrophization of political rhetoric, which you clearly got in the Middle east, but also in the US now is that people are exhibiting PTSD style politics. It's traumatized politics, and people are yelling at each other.

In the Israel Palestine conflict, Dirk points. Out that the October 7 attacks saw the highest number of jewish people killed at once since the Holocaust. While Palestinians feel that the military strikes driving people to the south of Gaza, where more military strikes, strikes are carried out, is a new nakba, a new catastrophe or disaster, when one might argue that at the root, all anyone wants is safety for them and their family or their nation or their group, no. Matter what the price. And this happens when we forget that we are all members of humanity.

It's a traumatized and traumatic politics, and that is imported into societies where you have, have people who are affiliated with that part of the world, Jews, Palestinians, Muslims and so forth. So there's kind of a territorialization of that conflict into our societies. I'm not criticizing them, just observing that. And you're seeing that on the streets of our cities where you have demonstrations now. It's important in a healthy democracy that these things can be played out in a non violent way and that there are opportunities for people to decatastrophise.

And this is where I think the gender element comes in. We did an event at City College yesterday with the head of our counselling center and then a couple of us, scholars who talked about these issues with 17 students in our Colin Powell school who were all heavily involved one way or the other, and that's why they were there. And the head of the counseling center talked a bit about how we all deal with trauma and whether it's directly or indirect, and the importance of listening, not necessarily forgiving, but understanding the perspective and emotions of people on the other side. And that, she said, at least gives you pause and might resist the temptation to immediately strike back, you know, whether rhetorically or otherwise. Right.

And hopefully just like reduce the temperature a bit in the way we discussed. This things, which I hope this has done. And do you have any glimmers of hope that as we become more informed and potentially more unified through some sort of, like, digital global community, do you have any hope of things improving or of these kinds of mass atrocities being called out sooner and stopped? Well, no, I'm actually pretty pessimistic because, I mean, just look at the falsification that takes place before our eyes. And with AI entering the chat, news outlets making their money with highly partisan content, political circles devolving into infighting, and kind of a hot take economy where people online are paid with attention.

Alie Ward
It feels like it's never been harder to wade through infighting and biased information. Meanwhile, at these places of conflict, it's life, death, physical and emotional horrors, tragedies, terror and existential threat. And people can watch this in real time and they're shocked. And this, you know, this is nothing compared to what Russians, you know, the russian bots are doing with any to Ukrainians or the, or chinese bots do to oyeghurs, you know. And then within Ethiopia, you have this conflict in Tigray, in Sudan.

Dirk Moses
I mean, wherever you look in Latin America as well, there are terrible conflicts going on. And. And those that are, if you like, telling us about what's going on, instantly discredited AI just makes it easy to invent quotes, invent pictures and so forth. So actually quite pessimistic now in terms of the. Why there's more mass violence going on?

Well, because there's lots of causes for destabilization within states. Like, for example, there's conflict within Sudan, which is massively destructive and we're not hearing much about. And a quick reminder, it doesn't have to be legally deemed genocide to be a crime of atrocity as a result of political instability. And there's a fair bit of that in many african states as well. Now, genocide isn't always the concept that best explains what's going on there, but there's mass violence against civilians.

There's a series of multidirectional conflicts in eastern Congo, for example. Now, as climate change worsens the situation, particularly in those sub saharan states, and leads to the collapse of agriculture and then more massive migration streams, especially heading to Europe, we're going to see much more of this. So I think once you factor in climate change and the, I think pretty quick collapse of agriculture along among large swaths of Europe, southern Europe, parts of Africa, Latin America, you're going to see much more migration and refugees. And just look at the hysteria about that topic in this country, let alone in Australia over the last 30 years, where I come from, where even a trickle of boats across the East Timorese leads to hand wringing about the security of our borders in a really wealthy, secure society. So shit's getting worse.

Alie Ward
It's going to get worse, yeah. As one of the foremost experts on this topic, any words of advice to trying to promote any kind of unity, any kind of action, any kind of soothing of this? Yeah. No, I know an american one needs to leave with an uplifting statement. Well, he got me.

I was looking for anything. Now, if you're concerned about victims of violence or of generational trauma. Dirk says to try to keep in mind that those wars do not need to be mirrored in emotional or physical violence across the world. World. My parting word would be just try to lower the temperature in terms of political rhetoric.

Dirk Moses
Decatastrophize. There's a tendency to catastrophization, which is really a manifestation of a trauma and a traumatized sensibility. Let's try to contain it. That doesn't mean forgive and forget, because the reason there's a traumatized sensibility, because there is trauma. There's mass migration because of mass murders that occurred in the country you came from.

This country has its own traumas with the history of slavery and indigenous genocide. So these things can't be wished away in some kind of Kumbaya mode. But we need to listen to people when they're talking about what happened to our people. One of the dilemmas in a vibrant, diverse place like America and Australia is that sometimes the communities, the victims and the perpetrators are living here, whether Jews and Ukrainians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, Turks and Armenians. There needs to be a way of conducting politics which doesn't repeat the genocidal energy of those places, let alone the genocidal energy that led to the fate of indigenous peoples in this country.

Mercedes Maitland
Yeah, that's a great note to end on, too. Thank you so much for doing this. I know your time is very valuable. Thank you for spending so much of it with us. It's great.

Dirk Moses
Are we being recorded? We're just about to turn it off. It's a pleasure to talk, and I'm happy to make time. It's important to get the word out there that academics write books to be read, and they don't do it for the money. They're not best seller authors who get their books at the airport bookshops.

So one way to get the word across is to do podcasts like this and talk to intelligent and sensitive people like you. So thank you. Thank you. So ask informed people uninformed questions, because that is truly the only way to learn something, and it's better to learn than to stay intimidated and overwhelmed and uninformed. Please be kind to each other, ask each other questions, learn of each other's perspectives.

Alie Ward
Thank you so much, Doctor Dirk Moses, for the time you spent with us and the research you continue to do. Again, his book titled the Problems of Genocide is linked in the show notes. We'll also link his social media handles so you can follow him, and other episodes that you might be interested in will be linked in the show notes, we're ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm lieward with just one l on both. We have shorter, kid friendly cuts of classic episodes and those are called smologies and are available for free@alieward.com.

Smologies Erin Talbert admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Noelle Dilworth is our scheduling producer, Susan Hale is managing director. Kelly R. Dwyer makes our website and can make yours. And our lead editor and in this episode, also a producer and contributed a ton.

A ton of excellent research is editor and impassioned empath Mercedes Maitland of Maitland audio. Jake Chafee and Jarrett Sleeper of Mindjam Media also contributed to editing of this episode. As Mercedes is out today with COVID we're wishing her quick healing. With that, Nick Thorburn made the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret.

And this week it's that while I am working on this, I have been really sick. You probably can hear it. Sorry about that. My immune system is trash. And in the middle of recording a lot of this voiceover, I had to stop and aggressively suck on a cough drop.

And the cough drop rapper had these encouraging slogans like, you got this and conquer today and impress yourself today. And I was like, cough drop? I don't got this, but thank you. I'm trying to get this. We all are.

Also, whenever you're needing a cough drop and your cough drop is like, keep going. It's like, has hustle culture gone too far? Either way, my cough is the least of problems on earth anyway, as long as we're at the end here and you've stuck around this long, and I just really want everyone to know I see them. I understand how much pain and injustice and fear and trauma is out there, and I want you to ask each other questions and research things, stand up for each other and be good to each other. Because at our hearts, we're all just a bunch of babies who are scared, at least in my opinion.

Okay, bye bye. Cryptozoology, litology, nanotechnology, meteorology, nephrology, serology.

Dirk Moses
Thanks for being here.