Ep. 58- Evolution of Genocide with Benjamin Meiches

The concept of genocide is one of the few ideas created from scratch in the 20th century.  As a result, it can be incredibly complicated to interpret, both legally and historically.  Indeed, the definition itself has often made it difficult to prosecute.

In this episode, I talk with Benjamin Meiches about the evolution of the concept genocide, the role of the Holocaust in its creation, and the challenges the debate over definitions raise today.

Benjamin Meiches is an associate professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma.

Meiches, Benjamin.  The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide (2019)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.951)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust Etruria podcast. I'm your host, Waitman Born. and today we're talking about genocide and obviously the Holocaust is one of them. and obviously it also had some, significant role in the concept and the creation of the concept. but I want to really talk today with today's guest, Ben Meach is about the concept of genocide. what it meant then, what it meant in the intervening period, what it means today.

And of course how that's related to the Holocaust. So Ben, thanks so much for coming on.

Ben Meiches (00:36.546)
Yeah, no, thanks for having me. It was wonderful to receive the invitation and looking forward to our dialogue.

Waitman Beorn (00:42.945)
Cool. So can you talk a little bit about sort of how you got into this particular topic? Because I must say you're a political scientist, which, you know, we're a very ecumenical podcast. We don't have to just have historians. So how did you get involved or interested in genocide?

Ben Meiches (00:58.508)
Yeah, that's a great question. So I started off as an undergraduate kind of taking a broad interest in politics, study of equity and hierarchy. And I was actually really interested in the post war, World War Two moment and international law. And the thing that kind of struck me about it was there's often this kind of like founding narrative, much of international humanitarian law, international war crimes laws sort of created

the wake of Nuremberg and it extends. And I was from that moment on. And I was really kind of curious as to what kind of colonial versus democratic practices were involved, how ideas were influencing trial proceedings. And I actually discovered and kind of became interested in the creation of genocide because it is something of an outlier.

from many of the other existing legal norms and traditions that were in dialogue at that point in time.

And one of the things that's kind of interesting, maybe to the audience, don't know, is that, well, know, concepts like crimes against humanity have some precursors. We have lots of notions of rights. There's obviously been wars or laws running the regulation of war for a long time. The concept of genocide is honestly only about, you know, 80 years old. We can actually indicate when it's produced, who produced it. And it had this really rapid move from being essentially notes in an academic book,

know, book to help synthesize a framework for understanding mass violence to now being understood as maybe the worst kind of violence imaginable. And that was really striking to me. So I transitioned from kind of trying to figure out what were the different ideas at stake in international law at that moment to where did the concept of genocide come and where has it gone? Because it has in a certain sense been very formative to our understanding of wrong as we articulate a whole variety of abuses, harms, injuries,

Ben Meiches (02:58.96)
memories, cetera.

Waitman Beorn (03:00.951)
And that's a great introduction because there's just so much here. It's such a rich topic. And we should probably start from the beginning. I I'm an historian, so we sort of have to have to do linear time in a certain sense. But where does this come from? Where does the term genocide come from? And can you give us a little bit of a history of the term?

Ben Meiches (03:23.144)
Yeah, no, no, it's a great story in some ways in the sense that it's interesting and intriguing and it has a lot of contingency, which I know historians often love, right? When the turning points happen and randomness happens. And my book, by the way, is The Politics of Annihilation, A Genealogy of Genocide, which is about the history. It's from Minnesota, but there are some other great texts depending on your kind of level if you're interested. Philippe Sanz has a book called East West Street that does a really good job of introducing this.

Waitman Beorn (03:34.443)
We love contingency.

Waitman Beorn (03:51.339)
which also features the Novska camp, yours truly has written a book about. But anyway, go ahead, sorry.

Ben Meiches (03:55.097)
Thanks.

There you go. Douglas Irvin Erickson has a great book on the fellow that we're going to discuss now named Raphael Lemkin as well. So if you're interested in other kind of reading resources. So you're probably familiar with genocide because you've heard of the United Nations Genocide Convention. That convention was a result of a whole series of UN dialogues in its kind of formative period. But the person that is generally came up with the idea is this fellow Raphael Lemkin, who is a Polish Jewish jurist who has

a long kind of history of writing on the side prior to getting interested directly in this on the question of how we would understand atrocities in international law. So Lemkin is, goes to school in the above. He is interested mainly in like patent law and trade law. And on the side, he expresses and we have his autobiography and memorizing documents, stuff like that.

An interest in like how are states going to grapple with the problem that according to domestic law, it is illegal for them to commit murder, but not against a whole population. And he sees this as this kind of hole in existing legal architecture.

And that's something that a lot of people are talking about in the 1920s, 1930s, in the interwar period. There's a great book by Mark Lewis that kind of talks about the different conceptions of international justice and legal models that were advanced at this period. And Lemkin actually proposed a couple of categories, one of which is called crimes of barbarism. And the other was crimes of vandalism that were about the destruction of essentially cultural or social groups.

Ben Meiches (05:33.998)
And it was either kind of the physical destruction. this would be acts of killing acts of mutilation controlling whether or not people can have kids malnutrition and acts against the Culture itself. So destruction of artifacts libraries, etc language and and he's actually not very well received because his idea is antithetical to a lot of the rights based traditions that were Popular at the time and were the prominent models people were kind of going for

You think about it, a notion like human rights, which gives the idea that your rights are based off your bodyment or your status of being human, your individuality, is very different than what Lemkin was resuscitating, which was actually a kind of a group or minority rights tradition at that point in time. So he gets kind of marginalized in those dialogues. He doesn't really advance those ideas besides writing some papers and essays about them.

Waitman Beorn (06:26.185)
And is he just to jump in, is he, is he initially looking at Armenia as kind of his, as his sort of case study or whatever?

Ben Meiches (06:33.74)
Yeah, absolutely. Because this is all, yes, this is all prior to the Holocaust occurring. And so his model is, his interest is in the Armenian experience. And he's very explicit about that. He writes voluminously later in his life about histories of genocides that precede Armenia as well. And in some cases will later kind of contradict himself in some cases, depending on

how his thinking evolves and changes because it does over time, but that's a really kind of important note, yeah. So he ends up in Poland when the Nazis and the Soviets invade. He flees on foot, makes this kind of amazing mid-war voyage around the world. He actually crosses by train the Soviet Union, gets on a boat to Japan and then gets on a boat to the States and ends up at Duke University where he's sponsored.

through connections he has in his legal network and most of his family is lost in the Holocaust in the coming years. Lemkin, however, gets a position of somewhat notoriety because he was noted for having a strong memory and he knew all of these different legal rules that had existed in different European states. And so he was an asset in thinking about when the Nazis were defeated.

what were the changes that were made? How had Nazi occupation been developed? And he ultimately is commissioned to write a study on that in which he goes country by country noting all of the alterations to his memory of the legal rules. And the concept of genocide is first written in this context actually. He uses it to describe an access rule in occupied Europe which is the book that he writes basically the destruction of a national or ethnic group which is the first version of the concept that we get.

in major print form. And he thinks that this is a really strong framework for understanding what is happening. He describes it as an act of war, not against a state, but a people, and thinks that international law and law in general has missed this very paradigmatic shift. He also famously describes it as a multi-phase process involving a kind of colonialism and the use of an oppressor's pattern, destroying an oppressed people's pattern.

Ben Meiches (08:48.354)
He describes a lot of techniques of genocide that include things that we might think of as cultural violence, biological violence, acts of physical control, linguistic control. He'll at different times say too that the groups that can be targeted for genocide may be as common as the ones that would, we think about in relationship to an event like the Holocaust and people who have red hair. So he thinks that there's some flexibility and fluidity initially in terms of the

things that tie people together that might make them targeted for genocide. So how does this kind of quirky idea to some extent vary, you know, not in keeping with the times become the genocide convention? The answer is that he gets brought into the Nuremberg Tribunals and the IMT and is an advisor to the Americans and Robert Jackson at that point in time, not a very well respected one, but one that was considered again, an asset because of his knowledge about law. And he is

frankly incredibly annoying. He will not stop talking to people about this concept as the better way to understand the types of harms that are being witnessed. And this is probably also the period where some of the initial information and outflow about the scale of Nazi atrocities is first kind of coming to light, even if it's not the focal point per se of the Nuremberg tribunals. It's obviously something that Lemkin is aware of and he writes about it in his pieces. But people don't necessarily love this idea.

It's kind of, again, keeping out of existing jurisprudence and they're not enamored with his efforts to constantly bug them to speak about this. And this is like a well-documented finding. But what does end up happening is that several of the prosecutors start using the language of genocide as part of the discourse or rhetoric in the Nuremberg Tribunal itself, which sponsors questions as to what the hell they mean because

it is a new term, right? It's a new, you know, that's probably a little reductive, but like meme as you were, they're like, wait, what is this that they're talking about, right? All of a sudden, what's this concept doing? And it starts.

Waitman Beorn (10:50.443)
I mean, it's something that's really interesting to just, just to jump in because like it literally is a new, I mean, it's, literally is a new word. I mean, it's like doxing or something. It's, it's like a word that is like, it's not just a new concept. It is literally a word that nobody has been using before at all. Yeah.

Ben Meiches (10:53.441)
you're good.

Ben Meiches (10:58.285)
Yes.

Ben Meiches (11:06.026)
ever accustomed to. So it forces people to ask questions about it, right? And the outcome of that is he gets these opportunities in the New York Times and other venues to speak and say, you know, this is the concept and this is what one we should use. And it builds momentum, partly because people are searching for language to articulate a set of harms that there really isn't a good vernacular for at that point in time. And so a certain sense, I actually think that it's not the intellectual value

per se, it's almost the aesthetic value that the concept brings to help make something sensible, not aesthetic in the sense of art, but in the sense of sensibility and perception that really helps, as it were, anchor it in that moment.

Waitman Beorn (11:46.345)
But are they using the term itself? Cause I've, and I've read a fair amount of Nuremberg stuff. And of course crimes against humanity is like the, the charge. And we'll probably talk about this, right. Which is not, which is something, at least nowadays it's something distinct from sort of, sort of genocide. and then, and they don't say, you know, and then the Nazis committed a genocide. I think it only, you said, I think in your book you mentioned only, it only appears, the word itself only appears like.

Ben Meiches (11:58.658)
Yes, that's right.

Waitman Beorn (12:16.049)
once, is that right? Or something like that. So it's more like the definition of the word is being used, but the word itself is not being used. Yeah.

Ben Meiches (12:17.314)
Yeah, it's used more frequently in some of the dialogues, right? we have like... Correct. Not frequently.

As the Nuremberg Tribunals move away from the IMT process and become more extensive, they start to use it more regularly. And there's some great work that's been shown on the multiple semantic versions of it that are employed. Alexis Stiller, for instance, has some great exposition of the fact that there are a lot of uses in minor trials and other settings that have like completely conflicting interpretations of what the term means or its scope, et cetera. So it really is an example of an idea

that resonates, but everyone is sort of filling the gaps on what it means. And out of this moment and this apparent need to kind of conceptualize and make laws against the acts that the Nazis had carried out, et cetera, it becomes a call for it in the United Nations. And the 1946 resolution that the UN passes says we need a genocide convention. And the result is we have to write a law.

for a concept that no one really knows the foundational meaning for, which is pretty hard because most of the way that our legal system is set up and legal regimes run is we wanna try to be exacting and precise. And that's certainly how jurists approach it. So what happens is essentially the general assembly says, hey secretary, can you create a version of this? And they have no idea what to do. So they actually convene a panel of three experts, including Lemkin to draft what's called the Secretariat Draft of Genocide Convention.

And the three experts actually don't agree on it. So they create this massive laundry list document, which includes a very expansive interpretation of the groups potentially subject to genocide involving almost any human group. A list of techniques that are expansive to the point that there are practices that would probably be just considered very minor acts of say, minoritization or discrimination that are also potentially acts in proof of genocide and sort of no

Ben Meiches (14:22.466)
big elaboration other than it should be banned under international law of what the mechanisms would be to be able to do that.

Waitman Beorn (14:26.167)
So, is the, is the sort of analogy or the challenge here that for example, burglary as a crime, right? It's, very easy to define, you know, because it's like, if you take something into your possession that legally belongs to someone else, you have committed the crime of burglary, right? And we, or of theft, right? And so we, understand that we, we, it's very clear, but then the problem with genocide is well, what, what are the elements of, of that, you know, you can't say in the same way, well,

Ben Meiches (14:52.643)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (14:55.713)
We have to prove for theft that something belonged to someone else. You took it without permission and maintain possession of it. Therefore you have committed theft. But with genocide, it's like, what do have to prove? What are the conditions? How do we know what, what you, and then this leads to the problem of the committee you're talking about.

Ben Meiches (15:11.128)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. mean, think about it like this. Part of the reason why traditional concepts of harm anchored in the body are like, say, an act of killing are easier to theoretically adjudicate and assess legally is because we can confirm whether or not someone is alive or dead, right? Now, there are border cases, or say someone is a comatose patient, where those kinds of questions are harder to figure out and the law ends up in these kind of tangles. But Lemkin is proposing harm to people not in their individual

capacity as individuals, because of harm targeted at group membership. And so it begs an epistemological question, a knowledge question of how do we define the parameters of that and under what conditions are harm actually affecting people as individuals versus targeted at groups? And obviously social groups produce themselves in an enormous variety of different ways and relations, right? mean, try to think about like one center anchoring mechanism for there. can't, they also change historically. And so

If you get away in any sense from an essentialist account of identity, this really cracks open a whole enormous set of questions about what the range and scope is gonna be. And those kind of, if you will, philosophical reflections on the nature of a group then have to be tethered to the question of what will states agree to as part of the UN framework? Because the more expansive the interpretation of genocide becomes in terms of the groups that are subject to the techniques, the more it puts

what might be very regular practices of state marginalization, but also, you know, we just went through the World War experiences. So there's been plenty of gratuitous violence waged in many different forms, makes them potentially liable too. And so in a certain sense, there's this very, you know, radical effort to try to expand and crack open some really important questions about how does violence actually manifest in, you know, 20th, 21st century and preceding that.

Ben Meiches (17:11.606)
in relationship to the very real constraints of the state system as it's emerging at that time and the hierarchies, whether those are racial, religious, et cetera, that are underpinning that. And that's really the challenge, I think, at that particular moment. Going back into your linear story, what happens is the Secretariat draft comes back and the answer is just, this is way too much. And it goes to what's called an ad hoc committee, which contains most of the great powers, US, USSR, France, Great Britain, et cetera.

to kind of narrow it down and they come up with a far more specified version of the genocide convention. And even that version is considered too restricted when it, too expansive when it goes to the UN General Assembly. And so the actual definition of genocide that gets approved, which is in the second article, is intent to destroy a group that is ethnical, racial, national, or religious.

in whole or in part, and that it lists six different sections or acts that are part of that, including killings of members of the group, fostering conditions that are inimical to the health and well-being of the group, destroying or preventing births in the group, forced transfer of children, et cetera. And there are two or three very big shifts that many genocide scholars have commented on for a long period of time that come with that, one of which is the dramatic reduction of the groups.

to just those four specific categories, some of which in the minds of the people that were writing these were very essentialist. So they had like biological understandings of racial identity at their basis at that point in time, not in keeping with how we might understand race as a social construct in kind of contemporary terms, but also what's called the specific intent standard. So under the genocide convention to...

be able to accuse somebody of committing a genocide, you not just have to demonstrate that they tried to destroy a group, that they had knowledge that their actions would do that, and the reason that they carried out those actions was expressly for that purpose. And so in a certain sense, it begs the question of the mindset that informs actions in order to be able to leverage an accusation of genocide at all.

Waitman Beorn (19:25.365)
which always then leads to a higher legal hurdle, because then you have to begin to prove what somebody is thinking in their head.

Ben Meiches (19:30.334)
much higher, much higher, 100%. And in contrast to say crimes against humanity, which is another international law, right, that covers many of the same acts, but with a very different paradigm that doesn't maintain that same standard.

Waitman Beorn (19:44.265)
And it's crimes, it's the difference between it's crimes against humanity. Also just it's basically just against lots of people. It does that. You don't have to make the distinction of who you're doing, who you're killing or it just, it's basically genocide stripped out of, with it, with sort of specific targeted groups. If you are, you know, starving an entire population or committing, you know, massive, you know, bombings or whatever.

Ben Meiches (19:51.874)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (20:13.855)
Like you don't have to prove that you're doing it because they were a certain ethnic or religious group. It's just, if you're killing lots of people and you're doing it intentionally, that's crimes against humanity.

Ben Meiches (20:22.114)
that that's that's more or less correct, right? It's a question of, if you will, mass rather than a question of identity and the strength or weakness of the concept of genocide, its utility and there's debate on both sides of this hinges on how important do you think it is to identify identity as an important feature of the way that violence has carried out, right? And what are the limitations that come with different approaches to that? Or what are the benefits from a protection regime from the standpoint of

trying to articulate and identify in the first place violence because you know there are examples limit cases where things that don't involve physical violence might still have tremendous tremendous harm to the cohesion integrity of groups in a way that could make it hard for them to reproduce themselves that might be considered genocide in ways that don't in any ways reflect say mass killing like you would see in the Holocaust or in the Rwandan genocide or other cases and so there's sort of some interesting boundaries that come up

with that.

Waitman Beorn (21:22.743)
And is this also the where, um, cause it's my understanding again, like I, I'm not the expert on this by any stretch, but the, know, for Lemkin, you pointed out in the beginning of your discussion, you know, Lemkin is also almost equally concerned about these cultural genocides. mean, these, these destructions of landmarks and, and, know, languages and education traditions, all of this kind of stuff. Um, and that sort of gets completely stripped out of, of the UN definition, right?

Ben Meiches (21:49.582)
Yeah, No, you're 100 % right. So was kind of going through the list. The other one is cultural genocide is more or less not a part of the Genocide Convention. It's entirely removed because it's considered, in certain sense, too threatening to the powers that be. It allows too many of their practices to be put into jeopardy. And think about the moment, again, the Soviets just went through de-kulaksation. We have extant colonialism. France is in satif, like what, a day or two after.

the actual conclusion of World War II. And so there's an expansion of violence that people are deeply uncomfortable with, including this kind of category in the American experience. It's ongoing segregation and the reservation system that's used as part of indigenous control, essentially, that are on the back of people's minds as they think about how to advance this concept, even if we were to grant that mass killing needs to be protected, we won't do any of these other practices. And so it's stripped down in that respect.

Waitman Beorn (22:46.679)
Well, yeah. And if I remember correctly, I think one of the first groups to actually try to invoke the, UN genocide convention was the NAACP and like black people in the United States. And then Lemkin like loses his mind over that. Right. so I'm like, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Ben Meiches (22:58.2)
So yeah, let's.

Yeah, yeah, so let's back up just a second. We'll get there. So, Lemkin, the Genocide Convention passes, right? It comes out of the General Assembly. Lemkin basically says the soul of the concept is stripped away. He is incredibly disappointed intellectually with the outcome of this process. He saw, you know, what did you do to this concept? You've made it impossible to try people potentially because this intense standard makes us, it's so high a threshold that it's hard to know what people are thinking.

There's no concept of culture at all, which is like for him, the whole point was to say people have cultures, those cultures are different. He actually has a fairly open and fluid interpretation of what that would be. He's kind of schooled by a sociological tradition in Eastern Europe that's apparently long dead. I'm not an expert in this particular part of the story per se, but has more in common with say Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities than it would any kind of hard and fast category of identity. So it's sort of people produce.

who they are, which is again, adding more ripples and layers into this. So the convention comes out and one of the first examples, although it's not the first, the nascent states of India and Pakistan accuse one another of committing genocide in the negotiation about the Genocide Convention. So they're proceeding in cases, but a group called the Civil Rights Congress in 1951 brings a petition accusing the United States of genocide.

for essentially the acts under segregation. It doesn't even go into the history of shuttle and transatlantic slavery and anti-blackness that is involved there and gets met with a fairly vicious response in the sense that there's an effort to suppress this movement. Paul Robeson has his passport revoked. There is an effort to try to keep it off the floor for general conversation at the United Nations, kind of realizing the concerns that were raised that.

Ben Meiches (24:54.242)
Minoritized and oppressed groups are going to see this as a beacon to call attention to their circumstances. And this is a moment when a lot of those struggles are articulated as being connected. So, you know, that's a document that also speaks to violence in the context of, you know, again, excellent colonialism. It's talking about the Korean War, et cetera. And so there is almost as a consequence of those movements materializing an effort to back away from the concept of genocide, at least in the American experience. There are other states that ratify it.

but there's no building of the type of international legal infrastructure to try cases of genocide in the way that was initially kind of articulated. And so what we have is sort of a false hope or false promise. We have a genocide convention that doesn't really do what the person who came up with the concept, whether his interpretation is good or not is another big thorny question, wanted, which has a really high legal threshold that many states won't accept as a norm anyways, because it jeopardizes sovereignty.

where sovereignty is really code for perpetuating certain kinds of injustice in most cases, right?

Waitman Beorn (25:57.303)
Well, and one of the things that one of the obvious group grouping, imagine grouping, whatever that is left out of the definition is political groups. Right. And, um, and often the Soviet union gets sort of the bulk of the blame for this. I'm like, Oh, well, the Soviet union is the one that vetoed because it

it obviously was knew that it had murdered lots and lots of people in the name of politics. that that a fair or is it something that basically all all the great powers like, you know, any day of the week, we this could be us next week. And so we're not going to.

Ben Meiches (26:32.226)
Yeah, I think that that's the common explanation is that it's mainly coming from the Soviet Union and that other groups were more uncomfortable with a cultural or social category alongside of genocide. But I think that there is widespread hesitation over political groups. Even Lemkin exhibits some suspicion about whether or not politics is a voluntary association in a way that other kinds of identity organization isn't, right? And so that's the case. The Soviet Union certainly has a steady play,

Waitman Beorn (26:58.527)
All right.

Ben Meiches (27:02.16)
I think Doug Ervin Erickson says that there's a pretty direct line in the negotiation table between Stalin, the drafts of the Genocide Convention and the articulations of the Soviet representative in the meetings. I mean, I don't think it's incorrect to say that someone who was responsible very directly for a whole series of the types of abuses that the Genocide Convention is intended to outline probably had an editorial influence that was not insignificant.

in defining the document, which, you know, if we jump forward a whole bunch now, right, the 1990s and 2000s, the Genocide Convention, the notion of genocide is viewed as sort of a really important tool in order to redress situations of mass harm. But in the 50 year period between those two moments, there's no real historicization or reflection on the fact that the version of the law that we got is actually designed to not really prosecute or

facilitate much scrutiny and certainly disconnected from any model of international justice, which was part of its original articulation. And so it's sort of like a weird moment where what we think now as being a really important tool in addressing atrocity crimes is actually from the perspective of when it was launched, a very weakened problematic and even counterproductive version of it from the notion of its founders. And so that's one of the fascinating things in this story as well.

Waitman Beorn (28:24.019)
Yeah. I and I think that leads into sort of some of the challenges with the definition because the definition can sort of be all things to all people or nothing to anybody. we already talked about that a little bit with the idea of political groups and the idea that they're voluntary, you know? And so say, you know, somebody wanted to kill every member of the socialist party in some country.

Who ca the fact that you could, I guess, turn your party card in or not. You're still being targeted as a member of that, of that particular group. So what is the, does that make it in the mind of Lemkin and others? Is it, is it not as bad if you're being targeted as a member of a voluntary group versus being targeted as a member of an involuntary group, which as you point out already has issues because you know, what ethnicity I am or what national group I am is also.

Even religion is can be viewed as an, as at least fluid, right? That I can move between these different things. I mean, certainly, I mean, even the Nazis figured this out when they were trying to like sort out ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe and they were, you know, getting all kinds of people that had, that were basically code switching back and forth, depending on who was in charge. So how does, how does that work with like the idea of, of is there a hierarchy of victim groups based on immutable?

Ben Meiches (29:25.934)
Thank

Waitman Beorn (29:47.959)
I'm using quotation marks here, immutable characteristics versus, you know, voluntary, but I guess part of it is, it's kind like when we talk about, sorry, this is long-winded question, but it's kind of like when we talk about the idea of race as a social construct, you know, and I talked to undergraduates and I tell them this, you but I also point out that that doesn't make it any less real to both the people that are sort of grouped into that category, either against their will or because they want to be.

And also the people that are being racist against them or, and discriminating against them. And it's still real and it's a real category because the people that are, for example, oppressing you believe it to be a real category.

Ben Meiches (30:29.486)
Yeah, yeah. So, so I'm going to answer this in a little bit of a roundabout way, but I think it will clarify this. So genocide studies scholars have long recognized these challenges and they've solved some of them by adding analytical categories or approaches to the study of genocide or the genocide classification to try to redress issues that come up when we run into the thorny question of when does a practice

that I am to some degree volunteering to do, right, but also is ascribed to me by others in a social context, right, end up kind of meeting and playing out. So one thing, for instance, is when genocide studies scholars study this stuff, they add the category of politicides, right, to just say, okay, the law didn't address this, so now we have this other term that is politically motivated intent to destroy, that should have existed as part of international law, and we can study it alongside genocide and have a much better understanding of where violence carries

out and by the way if you're carrying out a genocide but it's a politicized actually that's crime against humanity so we have legal tools in our back pocket to try to address those.

Not to say that those are functional legal tools all the time, Because international law is very limited in its application in an atrocity context so far. Another thing that has done is to try to say, well, there's obviously an implicit, and this is one of the things my book speaks to sort of most clearly, there's obviously an implicit set of social categories and types of harm, images of harm, forms of harm that international law is prioritizing and groups start to appeal to. So you can have.

if you were a formative influence where groups start to say, hey, we didn't really think of ourselves in the concept of being a racial or national group now, but because we want to articulate and say we've been impacted or oppressed in this way, we will in order to this pull on this vocabulary to help give a perspective or a lens to frame what's happened to us. And so it has a formative influence on how we articulate identities. One of the things that's kind of fascinating I read a few years ago.

Ben Meiches (32:29.742)
Pure research center, for instance, is that I think it's Jewish populations in America identify first by having been victims of the Holocaust before they identify based off religious ritual, which I'm sure if you journeyed back a few centuries would never, I mean, we can't do polling in 1700, but probably would not have been the first category that people would have connected with in the same way. It sort of shows that experiences of violence can start to identify.

groups, right? And part of that is because there is, you said, real violence that's done that, right? Whether that's in the context of racial violence or religious violence, etc., right? It can produce relations. So what some great genocide scholars like Martin Shaw have done is to say, well, it's not as simple as a group itself articulating its identity. The perpetrator in an act of violence is also defining your identity for you, right? Your identity is in flux. And so we have to kind of include multiple interpretations as it were.

to figure it out because as we know again from a context like the Holocaust, there are efforts to make the categories partly in advance, but then partly to fix them through acts of control and violence and restriction as well. this is where I think that there's as it were a strength in the concept of genocide because it forces us to address these really kind of important questions of social ontology.

It doesn't resolve the mess for us, but other approaches to addressing mass violence don't necessarily do that very well, right? If we just think about rights based off the body, right? It's not like the category of embodiment is self-evident either. We just treat it as such most of the time, right? And often the notion of you being connected to a social identity is entirely kind of removed. That means that the studies and the discussion about that end up being.

incredibly nuanced to some extent, right, in order to try to tease out when is violence and how does it occur. But most of those analyses are then unfortunately entirely out of step with the legal regime written around the genocide convention because

Waitman Beorn (34:31.255)
Yeah, I mean, this guy's going to say this is one of the challenges because like one of the, one of the courses that I teach is comparative genocide. And, and one of the challenges of course, is that as scholars, you and I and everybody else can like make up our own definition and add and subtract to what we think best actually fits the historical phenomenon. but again, unlike, you know, theft or armed robbery or whatever, there isn't a legal

a massive, we'll say legal body of precedent to this. And so like when it gets before the court, it doesn't really matter what we think as academics, you know, that what best fits it or how, yes, actually what this country was doing or this leader was doing is genocidal because they want to rely on sort of the legal way of finding meaning, which is how were similar crimes?

defined and prosecuted in the past. But of course, as you mentioned, because there's this big lag from 48 to the nineties, we don't really have that.

Ben Meiches (35:37.176)
Yeah.

And this is one of the funny things that then happens actually to genocide. It's one of the reasons why it's a big notion is that now like an important one is there's a movement to, and I think Samuel Moyn's work in last utopia and subsequent works that he's pulled out is really excellent on this in the human rights tradition. There's this big jump in citation, reference, discussion of human rights and international law in the 1980s. And his explanation is that there is a collapse of other

other.

as it were, sort of historical paradigms for understanding the good, whether that's self-determination or some version of socialism or sort of democratic capitalism, all of those are supposed to realize some version of a better world order or a better version of it. And he says, sort of none of them work out. And in late 70s, we start having like the 25th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Jimmy Carter puts human rights into Cameron-Fitz's State of Reunion or Inaugural Address, but like,

becomes this term and it starts to get used by dissidents in Eastern Europe protesting, know, kind of extend communist rule and how that's been worked. starts to appear in struggles for racial equity for the first time. And there's a big effort to say, Hey, we have this body of law. Why don't we start to address it? And Moyn kind of laments that because he views it as

Ben Meiches (37:01.774)
The term of human rights is of the most minimal version of what a person could deserve in terms of justice. It's not a robust vision of what that might look like or one with a lot of depth. What I kind of tack on to the story is it's at that exact same period that there's an uptick in people talking about genocide and crimes against humanity in ways that otherwise the volume and frequency with which people were speaking on this concept remains relatively low and static for nearly a 35-year period.

But when we get it in the 1980s and then going in the 1990s, that's when it starts to become the crime of crimes. It's sort of understood as maybe the worst of all violations that we can think of in international law. And it's the actual rarity of prosecution. It's the fact that it's viewed as having this specific intent standard that is different from other categories that give it this kind of special status, which means that it assumes even more than human rights violations or crimes against humanity.

the idea of being the ultimate or pinnacle crime under international law, when in fact that interpretation, that sense that's present amongst many of those groups is actually an artifact of attempt to make it not something that's actionable. And so, well, of course, people begin to say whenever we see X case or Y case of violence, we want to ascribe it or describe it as a case of genocide in order to make it the most meaningful, felt, and impactful thing when in doing so,

They're also in many cases so out of sync with the legal remedies that would be helpful to them that it ends up having this like, well, what are you talking about? And there's sort of like an amorphousness that comes along with the term. And that's why, and this is sort of my contention and bone to pick with many of the contemporary legal scholars and international law scholars is in some ways, I think the effects of the concept of genocide have been much more substantial and if you will, a social realm.

than they have been in a legal realm. We've had very few prosecutions outside of the ICTR and ICTY where those are the case, but it is present in memorial.

Waitman Beorn (38:58.475)
I was going to say that this is one of those things that, in a variety of different historical contexts and contemporary context, you know, I always tell, I always tell people that, know, that why does it have to be genocide? crimes against humanity. can, you can be tried and go to prison for life or executed if that was the, the, the punishment just as much for crimes against humanity or for war crimes or violations of the need of convention. Right. There are all these other.

other, routes, many of which are, are frankly, probably easier to prosecute because the, they're better defined as, as crimes. but as you point out, once we, once we add the sort of the suffering Olympics element of it, you know, that like, this is the worst, then obviously it has this sort of political, you know, heat without light, you know, it's, it's, it's just, becomes.

Yeah, if I call it a genocide, then people need to sit up and pay attention, you know, in a way that for some reason, you know, crimes against humanity, war crimes, violations of international humanitarian law don't have the same, the same sort of PR value, I suppose. I don't mean to, I don't mean to downplay genocide, but it, it,

You know, the, the, the logical extreme of this is, know, when I was a grad student at UNC, you know, I'd walk on campus and every once in a while, sort of the, the crazy far right people would show up and they'd talk about the genocide or the unborn or something, you know? And it's like, it's like, that's just, regardless of where you stand on abortion rights, that's just ludicrous. That's, it's not a thing, you know, but clearly they are grabbing that in the same way that the, on the other side of the far left, you know, you have the animal rights people talking, you know,

have a picture of a factory farm of chickens and then a picture of Auschwitz. And clearly the argument is this is also, right? But it actually, it seems to me to kind of muddy the waters. And if our goal of having this concept is to actually punish people for doing this, right?

Ben Meiches (41:02.668)
Yeah, yeah. Well, and there's multiple other effects. It's not just that genocide becomes as it were the, and this is like, I'm referring to this in a paradoxical way, but like the gold standard for wanting to articulate or identify a form of really gratuitous oppression, right? Which is sort of what we're describing here to some extent. And you're describing both sort of, you will, left and right permutations of that, that are.

Waitman Beorn (41:26.208)
Yeah.

Ben Meiches (41:27.382)
in a certain sense, twisting the concept to make their articulation in their case, but also doing it because of the rhetorical power the term has acquired in a relatively short period of time, right? That's that aesthetic piece that I was. It is the worst. If we were talking about this just from the lens of, me. There was my voice.

Waitman Beorn (41:35.179)
Right.

Waitman Beorn (41:38.847)
And it's the worst thing, That's the, it's the top Trumps. It's the worst thing.

Ben Meiches (41:50.344)
Anyways, if we're talking about just from the perspective of like, how would we best try and punish people for crimes that are in some form excess excessive, right? It's clearly not, right? If you were to talk to a prosecutor, it's much easier to get a crimes of against humanity interpretation and it has the same sentencing. So why do we care about the outcome of that one way or another? But there are many people who have sort of said, well,

then what do we do in cases where it is very obvious that identity has been targeted in this way? What are we gonna do with the status of this international law, right? Which is widely accepted and seems important, right? If people polled, you would probably find that genocide is the most important crime that people would respond to. There's also been a whole bunch of other effects because this is also kind of the case that international law and criminal prosecution is not a very functional.

method for redressing atrocities, right? It is punitive. It only operates in very limited circumstances, right? The occasions usually involve significant defeat after an armed conflict. think it's, Sir Hartley Shockcross says that you are only gonna be able to prosecute genocide in the event that there's a war and one side wins the war. You you think about the International Criminal Court, which is mainly only successfully prosecuted cases of genocide.

against leaders from a small number of African states. Most of those have not resulted in long-term penalties. Obviously, the ad hoc tribunals do that too in the 1990s and the 2000s. But maybe the question that also needs to be asked then is like, is a prosecutorial model of trying to address atrocity crimes the most useful or not? Is there something else? Because that's what, again, going back to Lemkin, that's the vision that's present there.

There's been a lot of efforts subsequent to that. And in the 1990s and thousands with the development of the Responsibility Protect and sort of an increased emphasis on humanitarian intervention to say, could we prevent genocide prior to its occurrence? And there are a number of plans that were floated in discussions. Madeleine Albright at one point had one. There's the Massachusetts Response Operations Manual that was developed that are trying to blueprint like, what would it mean to identify the precursors to an act of genocide?

Ben Meiches (44:11.31)
where we could then go in and potentially arrest in an early warning sense, forestall that, which of course presupposes that the precursors are knowable in advance in relationship to a concept that says things are actually fluid and changing all the time. And so there's this kind of like.

Waitman Beorn (44:29.367)
Well, and the challenge, sorry, the challenge with MAPRO has always to my mind been particularly coming from an American perspective is, you know, we don't have a great track record of intervening in other countries, sovereign affairs. And, and the problem is that in order to prevent a genocide, oftentimes you have to intervene in a country sovereign affairs to stop it from doing whatever you think it's doing. And at the end of it, even if you like, you know,

The great deity knows that you actually did prevent a genocide because there's no genocide. You have no proof that you prevented a genocide and it just looks like you are intervening in another country's sovereign affairs. And so, I mean, it makes, it makes all of that just a very difficult. It's a great sort of classroom discussion, but it's also in the real world. It's very difficult because it could rightly be seen in the context of the rest of history as just you intervened in another country's sovereign affairs, even if you literally this time are stopping a genocide, right?

Ben Meiches (45:27.81)
Yeah, yeah, and it's very different. I've had students before, speaking in the context of Holocaust history, for instance, who will ask the question of, hold on, in the context of the Holocaust, there was a knowledge of the Allies that this was ongoing, so why didn't they stop it? And it's like, well, then you're talking about a context where there's already an open-armed conflict, right?

in which knowledge could change maybe strategic priorities in a way that would have to do with respect to what kinds of human harm you're going to tolerate versus those that you're dealing out. Here, we're talking about an entirely different context, which is often an imagined scenario with sometimes very scant knowledge of whatever local social dynamics are ongoing that would be emergent, where the action would, again, change the nature of whatever emerges in terms of violence and social hostilities and potentially have its own repercussions.

And so you end up with a very difficult gamble. I this is one of the sort of paradoxes of genocide is it's sort of not knowable until it's already occurred. And even when it occurs, there's then contestation because the other flip side of that is denial, right? Which is to say, no, this never occurred. This never takes place since oppressors are most frequently invested in their own oppression and in extreme circumstances that can be state sponsored, officialized, you know.

Waitman Beorn (46:27.692)
Yeah.

Ben Meiches (46:47.086)
and, and all kinds of different ways, legitimated. mean, the example here of the Armenian case is probably the most prominent and kind of well substantiated, but obviously all cases of genocide have, pushback through formal and informal challenges as well. So it becomes kind of a touchstone to claim it never occurred. And so you end up with all of these sort of conceptual challenges coming to the forefront. and very few as it were tools to

actually meaningfully redress cases of violence while you have significant changes to how people think and articulate social movements to redress that violence, all of it without that mismatch ever kind of guaranteeing any kind of strong outcome. So you kind of have to yourself, if somebody says there's a genocide occurring, what is the aspiration that that rhetoric or that discourse, that claim would make?

and how do they envision that coming out? And I don't think we have a very clear understanding of the, as it were, mechanics in any way that would give us optimism that that claim will result in the kind of moral action that person is envisioning.

Waitman Beorn (47:54.807)
Yeah, and if we even go back just to the more academic side, know, one of the kind of the way that I teach it, and I may actually change based on this, is I sort of say, look, when we're looking at historical genocides, so like genocides that took place pre-Lemkin, right, where there wasn't a term, I usually say, look, we're gonna start with the UN definition just to give us all a common

sort of definition of what a definition of genocide. And of course, you could you could easily sort of massage that one way or the other using another scholar's add ons or subtractions. But, know, if we're looking at, say, you know, American Westward expansion and Native Americans, you know, like it helps to have like a basic starting point of like, OK, here here's here's one definition. Here's the one that at least the UN has sort of agreed upon.

But even then there are challenges with that. And I want to, I want to take a second to kind of have you talk about a couple of them. We already talked about the challenge of victim groups and who gets to be it. I always think one of the hardest elements is another part, is the, excuse me, the in whole or in part. because this is one of those, like, it's one of those definitions of obscenity kind of things. Like there's no definition of it, but you know it when you see it.

But what does this mean in whole or in part? Is there a numerical threshold? And of course, the definition says no. But on the other hand, if someone says, hate gay people, and I want to kill all gay people, and it goes into a bar and they kill three gay people, we wouldn't say they're committed to genocide, even though their intent was in whole or, you see what I'm saying, right?

but yet if someone goes into an undocumented tribe in the Amazon of a hundred people and kills 50 of them, you could, you could much more easily say that that wasn't attempted. So how, how do we deal with this idea of the in whole or in part, because it sort of then throws the door wide open to pretty much any, any number or no number.

Ben Meiches (50:12.204)
Yeah, yeah, And it's a great question. I would say that there is, what you're speaking to is a question of what's a mathematical and philosophical terms of neurology, right? It's when is something a part of a whole and when is it a whole, right? And that's kind of how in my book I address this because there are a whole series of changing or competing ways to frame and address this question. Some people have sought to establish numerical thresholds and it's sort of a question of signification.

Waitman Beorn (50:26.538)
Yeah.

Ben Meiches (50:42.168)
does a part become a meaningful part? Right? That's really what we're asking to some extent. And you could think of examples where for Lemkin, very limited violence would constitute an act of genocide. So think about like a really significant religious leader, like the Dalai Lama, right? Something like that. If the Dalai Lama were to be killed in a targeted act designed to disrupt the reproduction of Tibetan Buddhism, right? Which may happen because the Panchen Lamas in Chinese

controller, whatever.

That would be potentially in Lempkin's model, an act of genocide, because it's targeting a sort of core function that enables the articulation and continuity of a religious and cultural identity. And for him, that's just a single act of violence. And we could certainly define it as a human rights violation. It probably doesn't fit the category of war crimes, but it captures how there can be, as it were, enormous social value caught up in an individual in a way that isn't present elsewhere, right?

again, antithetical to the image that we have of how genocide is supposed to play out, which is often informed by the Holocaust, it's camps, it's mass killing, et cetera. And I think that for a lot of Lemkin's work and then people who have built on it, there's sort of much more of a spectrum as it were, because again, it's that identity-based piece that is the most critical. In legal sense, the whole or part is actually there to establish the specific intent standard.

It is that the part that you are destroying is done because you want to or are seeking to destroy the group. So your example of people that would go in and attack a gay couple or what have you, because they sought to destroy, say, all gay people or all homosexuals is an example of the type of thing that would be legally punishable, which again is very different than our understanding of where this concept is supposed to stretch or how it's supposed to go.

Ben Meiches (52:43.758)
going to the kind of academic route, we can have, again, a much more relational and interactive model of when and how we consider people to be significant and attack them or support them on the basis of their identities, right, and capture some of this. But there's been very few, as it were, tests of how this would play out in a legal sense. And so it ends up being one of the...

components of the Genocide Convention that is in a certain sense most confusing. It's also not part that Lemkin speaks about very directly. You have to kind of figure out where in his writings he's considering parts of a group versus a group in its entirety. But I do think it's one of the, as it were, assets if we're gonna think about what's the value of one model of atrocity crime versus another of genocide is that it does give privilege to the fact that

There are differences amongst social identities and social roles that play a difference. And my guess is if we were to study most patterns of violence, we would find that those are also reflected in the acts of perpetrators, Synagogues are treated differently than businesses are to some extent, right?

Waitman Beorn (53:57.815)
Yeah, was gonna say like in my example even, it's almost like on the domestic level in the United States and the UK and other places, it's embodied by this, I have a hate crime, which is saying, okay, you've committed normal crime, which is murder of the gay couple or the people in the gay bar or whatever, but we're adding on to the fact that you were doing this for a hateful reason, the homophobia, racism, et cetera, et cetera. so then it does,

become it becomes hate crime and that obviously in the American context, you know, the place I suppose comes comes with, you know, add on punishments or whatnot, but is but is not. Construed to mean even if that was your in your manifesto, you know, you're you're the tree of life shooter or you're shooting synagogue and you say something they don't necessarily are aren't necessarily taking you as a genocide air for that, but they're saying you are clearly a you've committed a hate crime.

as kind of a way of, I guess, mediating those kind of things.

Ben Meiches (54:57.15)
trying to establish that there is a motive there that we need to take political note of, but also to say we're going to deal with it through normal legal means. That's what's taking place there. There's probably a lot of literature on incipient domestic terrorism or fascist violence, et cetera. But one of the themes that I've always been drawn to is that understanding that behavior is isolated as opposed to distributed is a really important note in understanding social dynamics.

Waitman Beorn (55:04.63)
Yeah.

Ben Meiches (55:26.864)
in contemporary terms and it doesn't make a lot of sense that a series of isolated incidents are connected by kind of an ideology, but in some sense they are. It's just not an ideology that is producing all the time group coordination and behavior. That doesn't mean that it's not still targeting a group for their form of life, right? Which is the term that I kind of come to to some extent to describe this.

Waitman Beorn (55:51.095)
Well, there's an interesting, I think, follow on to that. When this gets to sort of the shadow that the Holocaust casts over the concept of genocide, both, think, in the legal sense, but also in our popular usage of it, which is, again, something you've mentioned in your book and also tonight as the standard.

Right? So that like, if we're not, if we're not, you know, if we don't have a government with a bureaucracy that is rounding people up, depriving them of rights, ultimately murdering them, you know, then we haven't quite hit the bar. Of course, you know, the, the, in Rwanda, for example, you know, the rate of killing over the, the eight months or whatever the gents are taking place far exceeds the Holocaust at any particular moment. And then Rwanda, while did, you know, use the radio and these kinds of things, wasn't a particularly

you know, of high tech, I suppose, modern genocide, right? But the challenge then becomes, you know, if we step away from that, and think this is what you're talking about when you suggest kind of throughout the book that the genocide is kind of created as a, or defined as a crime not to be prosecuted in a certain sense.

because for example, you know, we could, we could make an argument going back to the, the idea, for example, of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon or whatnot, right? These are clearly groups. think we could all agree there are their communities, ethnic, et cetera. and they may be being destroyed by people intent, intentionally going through and trying to kill them. They also may be destroyed by people, who are, you know, clear cutting the forest or whatnot. And again, they may not be.

They're doing it, we'll say with, with, with, with reckless abandoned, know, they're, they're, they're, doing it without con consideration of these other people. but the effect is the same. Right. And so then the challenge becomes how do we, you know, how do we mesh these things together into and create sort of intent, the intent element to it.

Ben Meiches (57:49.283)
Yep.

Ben Meiches (58:01.464)
So I guess there are practical reasons why, from a strategic or pragmatic perspective, when you're coming to a physician, you're analyzing a case of violence, you hear that there's something going on, whether we're in this case or another case, where it's what's the outcome that we're seeking, whose rights are we trying to protect, what is involved, and what are the tools that we have to be able to advance this? And what genocide has most profound

influenced, at least in contemporary times, is the awareness of things, because it's catching, it's emotive, it has an affective lure that's charged and draws people in. It hasn't necessarily resolved the question of which of these mechanisms is the best to be able to redress this, but most of those mechanisms are in international law, fairly limited in their use anyways, right, because they're protected by, you know, various kinds of hegemonic power.

state power and sovereignty and other things. And so there are only have so much aspiration for whether or not that realm is going to end up turning up all kinds of tools. For me, I think there's a lot more in the question of what do protest resistance movements that are both domestic contextual international look like and what would the effect of the genocide vocabulary have on them that often raises a whole set of question of like, how do we deal with counter protests and alternative versions of, you know, these concepts and

You know, for every left appropriation, there's a right appropriation of the thing. And so I don't think that there is an easy answer to that question. One of the things that I do, we refer back a second ago to, you said, you know, your teaching practice, you use the UN definition to look at a variety of cases in history. One thing that I do very similar to that is we'll use the UN definition, but then I'll take the ad hoc committee's definition of genocide and the secretariat definition. So every time that we're doing a kind of historical case study, we're looking at

three different interpretations and we see how would we kind of understand this differently? What are the questions we're asking or thinking about? And then what are the points where one interpretation makes an action of an organization or an individual different? And all of a sudden you get a really different response to a whole variety of different cases, right? So like one of the limits example here is the residential schools case, right? Which is.

Waitman Beorn (01:00:20.234)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Meiches (01:00:21.336)
been very widely discussed in the context of Canada and First Nations, but not nearly so much in the United States, even though the practice was widespread here as well. Partly because when the Truth Commission came to its conclusions, it said, well, this was an act of cultural genocide, but cultural genocide is not part of the execution of the Genocide Convention under Canadian law. And so it's sort of like saying, yeah, we're guilty of genocide, but not the genocide that is legally punishable. Now, that doesn't mean there weren't a series of negotiations back and forth, but

Waitman Beorn (01:00:47.04)
Right.

Ben Meiches (01:00:51.34)
If you just took the genocide conventions definition, residential schools possibly under the forced transfer of children, but there's some educational piece here. We don't know what everyone's intent was in that mindset. Maybe there are people who wrongly for very racist reasons, but believe that they were doing the benefit for people and that was their aspiration not to destroy.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:12.597)
Well, I mean, this is the challenge of all genocide is that, there's no one in the perpetrator side ever commits genocide for a bad reason. They all think they're, all, I mean, I'm being slightly tongue in cheek, but I mean, they all think they're doing something good. but also, you know, going back to your point, which I think is a good one, you know, when we look at things like the native American genocide in the, the, in the American context, you know, there are challenges too, because it's, it's taking place over a large period of time. again,

Ben Meiches (01:01:19.15)
Correct.

Ben Meiches (01:01:23.49)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:41.879)
I think the point that you made earlier is particularly relevant here, which is, you know, we don't know the intent of everybody and what everybody is doing. And obviously even there's a great book on the California genocide, and I'm forgetting the guy's name, Ben Kiernan's student. But anyway, it's a really, really good book. It's like Murder State, I think like that. But anyway,

Even in that context, he shows there are different people. There you go. Benjamin, thank you. but even in that context, there are, certain government officials that are very much actually sort of pro protecting native peoples. And then there are people that are very much not, but ultimately the end result is sort of the genocidal result. you know, and so I think that one of the things that comes out as conversation that that's particularly relevant is that.

Ben Meiches (01:02:11.726)
talking about Benjamin Madley.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:37.483)
You know, the idea of genocide is one thing for us as scholars and as a framework for understanding patterns of mass violence against groups in the past and may actually be more useful to us than it is as a legal concept, you know, because it's more amorphous there.

Ben Meiches (01:02:53.934)
Yep.

But also it's a concept where so much of the scholarly and legal literature on this presumes that the scholarly and legal opinion is what is authoritative, right? And that it therefore has some type of corrective impact on the way that the reception of this discourse works in every other context, which is of course, how ivory tower can you be a little bit, right? When it's used by a million other, of other people in all these other different ways, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:03:05.375)
is the right one. Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:16.075)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:20.32)
Yep.

Ben Meiches (01:03:26.084)
And that's kind of my point, which is that I hate to deliver a pessimistic message to some extent, but I feel like there's a lot of false hope caught up in the political aspirations surrounding this concept in a way that doesn't provide.

as many routes or safeguards as many of the people who have advocated for and tried to build both the social infrastructure around it and other pieces and the legal infrastructure wanted to. And that's a tough lesson because it's sort of saying, well, we have fewer resources to redress cases of mass violence and even to identify them in ways that we might want and just say, you know, with our scholarly or legal minds, we'll cut through and say this is versus that, you know, this is and that isn't.

than we might want. And I think that's dispiriting for many people.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:15.063)
I mean, there's a gatekeeping piece of it that is, I think, unhelpful, right? Because the stakes become so high, even though they're not. I mean, as we pointed out, if you're brought before a court and convicted of a war crime, you know, or crimes against humanity or anything else, I mean, the stakes are just as high for that as if you're convicted of genocide. But in the mindset of people.

you know, because I think the Holocaust hovers in the background and everything else, that it's almost like, we're not going to let you into the club if we don't think that your suffering, your experience has been bad enough. which then has the, I guess has the knock on effect of we're not going to prosecute people for creating that experience because we're not going to say that it's genesis. mean, I don't know. It's, it's a kind of like a vicious cycle here.

Ben Meiches (01:05:06.574)
Yeah, and it's also, I mean, there's been some really good work in genocide studies, know, Dirk Moses probably most famously, but there's a lot of others to try to expand and address.

various kinds of colonial and non-Western genocides and how they've materialized and to bring those back into the canon of genocide studies to make it more critical about that and to try to highlight how what are maybe sort of more established or canonical as it were genocides including the Holocaust, right, have in some sense limited or stripped away, right, overwritten other kinds of histories in ways that succumb to the dynamic that you're describing. I think that's a really important

criticism right I think we want to be mindful of the limits of what is for better or less a very historically you know colonized canon of knowledge but it's also partly because there was such huge efforts to bring attention to and make a series of studies surrounding the Holocaust and to say the Nazi genocide is a distinctive event it deserves its own kind of epistemology and dedicated resources that in a certain sense created the conditions of possible

ability to launch into all of these other areas and issues. And so I think that there are, it's, it's tenuous because it both is, I think, an important development to say, yes, we need these kinds of parallels, we need these examples, and we want them to be a part of the dialogue, but the exact same time, saying that there are differences and similarities always then has the question of, well, is this too different to be counted and by whom, right? So that's where the question of who's powerful and not in the dialogue is.

really important. And in some sense, you know, I've said this before at interviews in the past that like, I think the question of if you're a victim of violence, whether or not you use the term genocide or not is sort of like the last thing on the list of what your concerns are, but creating the space for people to be able to say this in different ways than has been in the past is a really important move to facilitate and open some of those avenues. And that's where my

Waitman Beorn (01:07:00.531)
You're equally dead. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:13.771)
I mean, think it's, I think it is, I think you're right there. I mean, I think it, I think it is kind of like the hate crime analogy where, you know, if I was that gay couple, you know, I think it would be meaningful to me to have the person charged, not just with attempted murder or whatever, but also with the hate crime, right? As, because that's a recognition that like of my own, my own sort of identity as it relates to

the crime, you know, that you were trying to do this for a specific reason, the above and beyond the act itself. And so I can see that with genocide too, that, know, people want that, want that set of recognition, you know, that, that the, were targeting us as a, as a particular, mean, it's essentially it's ideology, right? I mean,

Ben Meiches (01:07:58.062)
But here we, but we'll go with flip example, okay? So let's go to your example of, you know, an Amazonian people or nomadic people that are not incorporated within a state framework, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:08:10.583)
You may have no idea what genocide is.

Ben Meiches (01:08:12.258)
They have no idea what genocide is. They don't care. You if you read somebody like Pierre Clastres, right, Societies Against the State, you know, those folks have no interest in any of this. And so saying you're subject to genocide is already in a certain sense inscribing people into a very framework that they seek to resist. And so the recognition can both be the source of its own kind of colonial oppression in cases as well. And so again, there's no simple and uniform answer to this, which is,

Waitman Beorn (01:08:28.375)
Mm.

Ben Meiches (01:08:42.693)
problem because the whole point of the vocabulary of genocide in popular understanding is it should provide simple and easy answers to the complex moral questions that come with mass violence and

Waitman Beorn (01:08:47.958)
Yep.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:51.797)
And there's a very, there's a very Western focus in a weird sort of way. I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to walk myself down this road, but you know, because, because sort of the academic discipline of, of genocide studies is a very sort of Westernized doc, doc, the Westernized study, but also I think

international law very much has been dominated by sort of a Western European American grouping that you almost have genocide being defined. And most, most of the examples with, with a few, with relatively few exceptions, mean, not in reality, but in sort of popular, popular understanding or Western nations either committing the genocide or being the victims of the genocide in the case of,

Holocaust or Yugoslavia. It's almost like we're dominating all of that discourse. it's another way of, I mean, it's not allowing for sort of non global North countries or peoples that are both victims and perpetrators of genocide. they just aren't, I'm kind of racking my brain here for, mean, obviously Cambodia is an example. Obviously, Rwanda is an example. Sudan is an example, but

And over the history of time, you know, it's not just the Western European nations that have done this, but they're the ones that are really are dominating the field. If it were as it were.

Ben Meiches (01:10:26.348)
Yeah, there is a very brilliant set of essays put together by Zoe Samudzi. I think I got her name proper, who I think is now at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the phenomenalist. And I think the title of it was Against Genocide, in which she says, and then a series of essays kind of continue to extrapolate on this that are written by other folks that just like, this is sort of a discipline that doesn't have a voice historically, other than the one that you just described. And as a result, it's sort of a question of

Waitman Beorn (01:10:36.544)
Okay, yeah.

Ben Meiches (01:10:56.322)
who are you speaking to for what purposes and there's still value in having teaching practice around it because the number of students who walk into the door who don't know the number of people that were harmed in the holocaust which is often you know again the standard right is is significant and those are important artifacts for how we got here and why people feel the way they do and how we're going to have questions about

justice and all kinds of things, but it also means that it has been very, in a certain sense, limited. And again, those are the people who are theoretically resisting the limits to the legal interpretation, which is already so restrictive in the first case. So you're sort of piling a, you know, it's a pyramid or a hierarchy of restraints and constraints around this concept that's just bursting left and right or trying to, and, you know, that's also reflective of the conditions of academic knowledge creation more generally. I

I don't think that's unique per se to genocide studies or Holocaust studies or something along those lines. I mean, it would change the literature that I might think about teaching in class, what cases and how we debate intervention. mean, if you talk about what kind of humanitarian intervention to stop an ongoing act of genocide and where to try to run a classroom simulation, you discover that the constraints and unintended consequences of that are phenomenal with very limited chances of success. If you ask yourself,

whose land are you on? And why does that matter to whom? It ends up maybe being a much more fraught and sensible, but also everyday discussion. So, I think that that's really broadening the conversation that can be had about this is sort of what academics are best positioned to do, but also maybe the last thing that gets included in conversations surrounding the politics of genocide in universities.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:41.943)
Yeah, I mean, think that's, it's almost like, mean, whatever keeps, it keeps popping into my head is this, that phrase, no, no, not like that. You know, it's, cause it's like, want, I mean, with the example, you know, like the, the, the lynching in the American South, you know, like, you know, we don't want you to, no, no, don't, don't invoke genocide like that. Like that's not, that's not comfortable for us. You know, don't, don't, don't suggest that there's an ongoing genocide against Native Americans, you know.

I've heard this argument, due to, you know, for example, their impoverishment and the position they're placed in by the state in reservations and everything else. Don't like that's not comfortable. But the Holocaust is comfortable. we like the Holocaust is comfortable for us because it we understand that and it's very clear. It doesn't it doesn't make us uncomfortable. But these other ones do.

Ben Meiches (01:13:30.316)
It's over there, it's radical evil. We can see how bad the ideas are, et cetera. But I will say on the flip side though, right, in the context of say, First Nations and Canada, we don't want to recognize the genocide exists until we do. And we want to mark the fact that we did to say that the settler colonial past and its viciousness is no longer where we are now. Now we're a society that can admit this. but if we look at structural inequity, systemic inequity, it's still profound. So we extend.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:34.177)
Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:48.599)
and draw a line under it and be like, and apologize for it. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:13:59.115)
Yeah.

Ben Meiches (01:14:00.29)
the past by drawing a line between it using this concept too, which is another one.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:03.413)
And this is the challenge with reparations for slavery too, that you see organizations, institutions, that some of them want to say, open our books and say, this is all the stuff that we did, we're very sorry about it. And again, some of them are completely legitimate in this regard. But some of them are doing it as you point out, because they want to say, okay, now we've apologized, kind of the Willy Brandt and Warsaw where like, I've apologized now for Holocaust.

So now we can be done with it. And then other groups that don't want to open that door at all, because once they start recognizing and or paying in some way, or form, making reparations, making amends, then they think, probably rightly, there's nothing we can do to fully make reparations. So we're going to end up doing this forever. And so they don't want to, they don't even involve in it at all. And so then you have this sort of polarization of it.

Ben Meiches (01:14:57.038)
it.

At the same time, you know, there's a phenomenon in Holocaust memory that's been well documented like Yelena Savidich, who has a great book about this, right, that in some context in Eastern Europe, it's become, well, it's not really the Nazis, it's the Soviets who are the real problem, right, in formal state negotiations. So there's this almost as it were transformation of the concept to be not about many of the existing features of Nazi Germany. And you could do the same thing in the concept, you see it coming in the context of genocide, where it becomes a very

sort of right-wing modality and framing of politics. It could be both, you know, sort of the victimization that we see in the way genocide stuff is certainly a piece of that that's coming there. But there's even scarier versions of this, right? There's this weird background assumption that we own concepts and what their moral framework and architecture could be. You know, the concept of genocide is also in a certain sense a blueprint for categories and methods of harming people.

Waitman Beorn (01:15:38.856)
That's what I going to say. Exactly right.

Ben Meiches (01:15:56.216)
that wasn't crystallized previously in exactly the same way, right? And so now it's out there also and becomes in very small movements, but in extremist movements, the goal, it's the aspiration. And those are also very alarming types of political discourse, far and away from the legal ones that are there that get almost no attention in this kind of discussion.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:20.181)
Well, this is the other genealogy that, that, that I would bring up about, about genocide, right? I mean, like your, your book and your work is, is amazing. And it's about the genealogy of the term and sort of its prosecution and also it's, it's debate over it. And then there's the actual genealogy of the perpetrators where like, they are aware of these things, right? I mean, like Hitler talks about the first nations. He talks about Canada. He talks about Britain and India. He talks about the Americans. And I mean, talk about the, I like these are the.

Ben Meiches (01:16:45.706)
remembers the Armenians.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:49.751)
These are not occurring in a vacuum. I mean, like, you know, these are, these are terms, you know, that, that not only, that only rhyme, but are sometimes direct connecting. Like someone's like, I saw them do that. I want to do that. Like this myself. Right. Um, and, and, know, and you're right. I mean, like that becomes, it becomes a blueprint certain to a certain extent.

Ben Meiches (01:17:09.186)
And there's two versions of that. There's two versions of that. I know what's banned, so I know how to do it without doing the things that are banned or to increase beniability. And then there's, you we also live in a moment where the author, China Meville, really said this nicely, that we're like in this very sadistic, excessive violence that we like against others as spectatorship kind of moment. There's a great piece of it, he wrote on this in like maybe five years ago, 10 years ago, that was,

Waitman Beorn (01:17:17.078)
Yes.

Ben Meiches (01:17:35.438)
don't remember if it's in Collapse or what the journal was that was part of that. Like, no, no, this is what I want to embody and carry out. And we see that in neo-Nazism and other cases like this where there's an effort to return to spectacles in a certain way. And this is a piece of that. So if genocide is a concept, is a kind of tool, a theoretical one or a linguistic one at some level, it's not just people who seek to end that practice that can use it to their advantage in various ways.

Waitman Beorn (01:18:02.795)
Yeah. And actually it's also, it's also becomes, like genocide denial in a certain sense. Again, I'll use the American context because the Holocaust denial is just like a more sort of black and white kind of thing. But I feel like in the United American context, there's a certain group of conservative to far right folks who essentially like to deny the native American genocide.

just for the sake of denying it in a certain sense of being like, you know, like it's woke or, you know, it's, it's, it's making Americans feel bad about themselves, that kind of thing, you know, and also we probably agree with, with the genocide in the first place, right. But, we're going to deny our, our, vehicle for sort of expressing other related, but unrelated political beliefs and you know,

probably less palatable public beliefs is to deny the historical situation. So then genocide denial also is sort of instrumental for these political groups to kind of, yeah.

Ben Meiches (01:19:14.294)
it extends harm into the present. Yeah, socially and psychologically, right? And I think that that's, that's again why I...

I question the implicit framework or presuppositions of how so much of this literature has debated for so long, what is the best normative interpretation of this concept? How could we supplement or improve a legal regime? It's not that those are not potentially important questions or they're worthy ones to consider, but I think there's so much more going on surrounding this concept that we've just as genocide scholars, Holocaust throughout scholars, scholars in general, been disattuned to.

that we really only kind of touched a very small piece of the puzzle that we've introduced. And I don't think the concept of genocide is gonna disappear overnight. mean, maybe 50 years from now, it won't be part of our vocabulary, but it's the defining evil in Marvel movies that kids are watching. The bad guy says, that's what I wanna be able to do. And that tells me that it is resonant in popular circles way

Waitman Beorn (01:20:16.652)
Yeah.

Ben Meiches (01:20:26.584)
beyond the little conversations that we're mainly having with.

Waitman Beorn (01:20:30.422)
Well, and I think also one of the things that your book points out, and I think it's, I think it's fair. I mean, I'm not sure it's, I don't think it's pessimistic. I mean, it's that it's sort of a, um, a bit of an antidote to this idea. Again, it's often the way we teach it too. I've, I've taught it that way probably, um, in the past before I thought more about it, but of this sort of progressive arc, you know, of like bad thing happens Holocaust.

Um, we have Nuremberg. Nuremberg is not perfect, but it's a good step. Then we have genocide. That's a better step. You know, then not everything's perfect. It doesn't work out well, but then we have the international criminal tribunal for Yugoslavia and that has problems, but it's, but it's idea that this is we're on some sort of Wiggish progressive art to, to greatness or to, to perfection where. we may be, but it may be bending very, very, very slowly towards, towards that, you know, because we have.

all these other challenges that you've brought up in terms of just the definition, but then also in terms of the fact that, you know, the international criminal court has no executive arm. So it has to rely on people being brought to it. And, you know, I mean, there are all kinds of, and so maybe, you know, there isn't this sort of, you know, pre-ordained launch trajectory towards a more perfect world, you know, even though that may be what we, what we want to do, which is a very pessimistic thing to say, but.

Ben Meiches (01:21:55.34)
Well, I think Lemkin was hoping that we were going to produce a totally different organization of social justice, world order, whatever you want to describe it was, and that this was a key to it. And in some ways, a more robust conception of genocide imperils all of those commitments, right? You can't have hierarchy and sovereignty in the way that you want. so it's, it's, it we traditionally done. And so it's an, you know, a very different vision. And I

Waitman Beorn (01:21:55.358)
And I think it's.

Ben Meiches (01:22:25.264)
I think that's part of the reason it's also a strong term is that it's a political imaginary in some cases that beckons the possibility of people radically caring and organizing and committing to nonviolence and coexistence in ways that are not otherwise widely recognized. And so I can understand the appeal of wanting that. And from the very beginning, he was like, this is not going the way that we wanted it to. So it's...

It's a bit of a dehistoricized, if you will, optimism that we experience now because he was not optimistic from from jump. He didn't think after the first version of this became official that it was headed in the right direction. And so.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:09.013)
Yeah. And his first, his version of course is because it handles all of these things that are much more difficult to wrap your head around, like cultural genocide, it is envisioning a world in which those kinds of things are almost taken equally as seriously as murdering people. And that's just not the world that we live in for the most part.

Ben Meiches (01:23:29.582)
It may have been unrealistic from the get-go, also like, you know, history advances with unrealistic and interesting ideas or something. don't know. There's some grandiose statement we could make about that probably that would capture us.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:39.893)
Yeah, yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:43.881)
It's aspirational, but then a lot of things are aspirational that ultimately we get close, close to, right? If we don't.

Ben Meiches (01:23:50.016)
Yeah. I mean, I'm not the historian here per se, but I also, you I would, I, I've thought for a while about like how many novel concepts does the 20th century really produce outside of a technical realm? And this is one of the few that I can think of.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:54.423)
You

Ben Meiches (01:24:09.292)
I think that a lot of our vocabulary is otherwise, I mean, it's been changed and it its semantics, alter over time, etymology changes, et cetera. But there are very few concepts that I can think of that have stuck like this has. And there are people who are living who are older than the notion of genocide.

Waitman Beorn (01:24:27.415)
Yeah. No, I mean, I was going to say that that's exactly right. mean, like this is something that you could, you know, mean, Google Ngram is ridiculous, but I mean, literally it is one of those things where actually the Google Ngram is accurate. know, like nobody was talking about, literally nobody's talking about this before a certain point in time, you know, and like, and I think that's a, I think that's a really good way to sort of wrap up too, that, that yes, like we haven't gotten there in terms of how do we deal with this concept? How do we prevent it? How do we punish it?

But as far as sort of radical aspirational ideology that we could do that at some point, this is actually something quite new and ultimately challenging in sort of a positive way. So I think that's a good, yeah, that's really smart. That's a really good way of ending it. Yeah, I'm gonna think about that a lot.

But before we let you go, because we've spent a lot of time here, but it's amazing. I think we've really covered a lot of ground. Is I always ask, you know, what is, what is one book on the Holocaust? And maybe you haven't really, I don't know if you read, read deeply into the Holocaust, but what's one book that you might recommend to, to our readers, our listeners.

Ben Meiches (01:25:42.124)
So I'll talk about a book that is about the Holocaust a little secondarily, right, but certainly one that was influential for me at a point in thinking about memory and resonance, which is Peter Novak's The Holocaust in American Life, which.

was one of the books that I read as an undergrad and really brought to sort of life for me that a lot of what was kind of discussed and thought about and memories that were shared and kind of was something that was also made and that there was a process there and there was always kind of a history there. And it was a piece that had a important influence in me then thinking about like, okay, international law also a product of memory and made in different ways.

who's part of that. So it was kind of a leaping off point in that speak. And I know that's a 25 year old book, 30 year old book or something. But you know, some of those texts are important. And that was one that was definitely, you know, in the background that led me to some of the questions that I ended up with. So

Waitman Beorn (01:26:46.839)
Absolutely. Well, I'll put that on the, I'll put that on the list and that's, and it is a good one. I mean, it's a controversial book, you know, and it, it makes some claims that are, that are challenging, but it's also really, I think, insightful in a lot of ways too, about, about the way that if we, if we blow it out more generally about how, you know, ideas are mobilized by different groups.

You know, terms of identity and everything else, it's definitely, I mean, I've read it, it was assigned to me. It's definitely, I think a great, a great recommendation. So we'll put it on there. Um, for everyone else again, thank you so much for listening. Um, again, if you're finding this, this podcast engaging and helpful, please give us a comment, leave us a like, you know, subscribe, tell your friends, um, send me an email, whatever. Um, again, uh,

Thanks for listening and Ben, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us.

Ben Meiches (01:27:38.258)
Thanks for having me. It's been a blast.