1. Twentieth-century genocide Maartje Abbenhuis
History 103
Twentieth-century genocide
Maartje Abbenhuis

3. Focus questions What does the term ‘state violence’ mean?
How would you define the term ‘genocide’?
To what extent would you agree that the twentieth century was a century of genocide?
What role have international agreements played in the history of genocide?

4. State violence
Violence committed by agent(s) of a government or state (as opposed to criminal activity of individual within state)

5. History of state violence
legitimate violence?
‘just war’
Sun Tzu ‘supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting’
Clausewitz ‘policy by other means’
Napoleon ‘soldiers are made to get themselves killed’

6. History of mass violence
Not unique to 20th century:
Taiping Rebellion : 20 million+
Mongol conquests (13th and 14th centuries): up to 40 million
European conquest of Americas: tens of millions

7. Holocaust/Shoah 1941-1945 Holocaust: ‘burnt whole’
Shoah: ‘catastrophe’

8. Winston Churchill 1941
‘The aggressor ... retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his Armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands - literally scores of thousands - of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German Police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe…, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale. And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.’

9. Inventing a language for mass violence
GENOCIDE: genos (Greek: race), occidere (Latin: killing)
To eradicate an entire group of people or nation.
Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 1943
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crime of Genocide 1948:
genocide, crime against humanity, war crime
(do the terms matter?)

12. Othering
Removal of humanity of victims Akira Iriye: contradiction 20th-c world: extreme nationalism and violence v. move to global cooperation and internationalism

13. Herero and Nama
Vernichtingungspolitik (policy of destruction)
contemporary assessment: ‘atrocity’

14. Armenian genocide
First World War ‘great accelerator of modernity’ incl. genocide (Annette Becker)
‘fog of war’
Intersection: history, remembrance, politics of the present

15. Holocaust
NSDAP Germany
‘fog of war’

16. Response
UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man 1948:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law
Nuremberg Trials
International Criminal Court (2002), International Court of Justice (1945)

17. Rwanda 1994
Tutsi and Hutu
‘fog of war’?
UN peacekeepers