BOOK REVIEW – GENOCIDE’S AFTERMATH: RESPONSIBILITY AND REPAIR
by Claudia Card and Armen T. Marsoobian (Editors)
Metapsychology, NY
Dec 19 2007
Wiley-Blackwell, 2007
Review by Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., C.C.C. Reg., S.A.C. (Dip.)
Dec 18th 2007 (Volume 11, Issue 51)
When genocide scholars meet in international forums, one cannot help
but notice that historians, political scientists, sociologists,
and psychologists enjoy strong representation in the scholarly
crowd, but equally obvious is the penury of philosophers drawn
to this subject of inquiry. Thus it is refreshing to find that,
with Blackwell’s publication this year of Genocide’s Aftermath,
philosophers are finally joining the chorus of investigators addressing
this critical topic. Analysis of genocide, perhaps the most horrific
of phenomena to scar the landscape of human history, is necessarily
a multi-disciplinary task, as its origins are to be found in a broad
array of dangerous factors that inhabit every arena of human life.
The shortage of philosophical attention to genocide, therefore,
has been a genuine problem to a full understanding of genocide.
Philosophers bring something unique to the table of scholarly
discussion, as their expertise prepares them well to clarify and
articulate a conceptual understanding of the nature of the peculiar
crime against humanity labeled "genocide." The collection of essays by
philosophers in Genocide’s Aftermath makes a valuable and much-needed
contribution to the scholarly study of genocide.
The volume opens with an essay by Claudia Card, "Genocide and Social
Death," in which she recounts her definition of the peculiar harm
effected by genocide, first explored in her 2002 book, The Atrocity
Paradigm (Oxford University Press). Card’s notion of social death as
the distinctive harm of genocide focuses attention away from victims
as individuals and toward individual victims as members of ethnic
groups left degraded as cultural entities. For Card, genocide is
"evil" for the obvious reason: it composes a unilateral slaughter of
defenseless civilians, including babies, mothers and old folks. But,
before their death and after the genocide, social death is achieved
by particularly dehumanizing treatment of the victims. Victims
are deprived of control over vital trans-generational interests and
other vital aspects of human life. They are dehumanized and degraded,
including being stripped, robbed, deceived, sexually violated, made to
witness the murder of their family members, and made to participate in
their own murder; they are killed without regard for their lingering
suffering or exposure, and once murdered, their corpses are treated
with disrespect.
For Card, genocide is not simply reducible to mass death, the killing
of great numbers of individuals. Nor is it simply the scandalous and
degrading nature of genocide’s harms to individual victims that draws
forth the peculiar opprobrium that Card names "evil." The crux of
genocide’s peculiar evil resides in the fact that social vitality is
erased in the victim group so that harm extends beyond corpse counts
to the murder of cultural heritage, the erosion of intergenerational
connections, and the "natal alienation" of descendents of the victim
group. These grave losses on the group level Card names "social
death." Social death aggravates physical death by making it indecent
(p. 81) and kills the community, as a setting for group life and for
observance of a shared cultural tradition. Future generations of the
victim group suffer erasure as members of a cultural heritage.
Mohammed Abed’s "Clarifying the Concept of Genocide" reviews
the definition of genocide established by the 1948 United Nations
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,
deeming it arbitrary and inadequate and clarifying its conceptual
shortcomings. Then Abed explores the harms inflicted by genocide to
determine whether these harms are qualitatively different from the
harms imposed by other forms of political violence. He concludes
that one of the greatest harms effected upon ethnic entities
is one that has been consistently underappreciated in scholarly
discourse and that remains unaddressed in post-genocidal reparation
responses. Abed argues that many ethnic groups self-identify in
terms of sacred spaces. Cultures tend to be "territorially bounded,"
remarks Abed, so one of the worst harms done during genocide is
their group’s removal from their historic dwelling places. Values,
norms of behavior, mythic components of cultural life, and other
symbolic mechanisms that condition and shape cultural memory are
invested in ancestral territories, so deportations often cause the
"destruction of the national pattern" of the group" and have a serious
impact upon the psychological profile of survivors and descendents
within the group (p. 37). Social death" is most successful where
peoples have been driven off their ancestral lands and robbed of
their territories; Abed cites the reservation system which confines
American Indians, the township and homeland systems of South Africa,
and the collectivization of peasant farming by Stalin as examples of
this aspect of social death.
Karen Kovach shifts the focus from victim groups to perpetrator groups
in her "Genocide and the Moral Agency of Ethnic Groups."
Against the traditional accounting of culpability as resting upon
moral individualism, Kovach refuses that individuals alone should
be deemed moral agents, and she warns of the danger of failing to
recognize the inherited nature of moral status across generations
within ethnic groups. She insists that the completion of the mourning
process for victim groups parallels the degree to which predecessors
in the ethnic community of the perpetrators accept responsibility
for the acts of their ancestors. To identify oneself as a member of
an ethnic community, argues Kovach, is to act in the context of a
history that already contains morally significant actions and events.
In a troubling universalizing move reminiscent of the ancient world’s
"pollution" tradition, Kovach insists that ethnic identity carries
with it a moral burden, which necessarily imposes responsibility on
descendents of perpetrators, causing them to share in a collective
guilt for the crimes of their forefathers.
Martina Oshana accepts and extends Kovach’s notion of inherited
guilt in her "Moral Taint," insisting that a person’s moral record is
"sullied by the unjust conduct of those with whom one is associated"
(p. 71). As with tainted food and tainted relationships, taint
occurs, according to Oshana, by "active participation or collusion
on one’s part or vicariously, by solidarity and collective liability
arrangements" (p. 83). Most troubling is her insistence that ties of
responsibility hold descendents fast, "even where these connections
are not deliberately forged" (p. 83). Oshana casts a very broad net
in her quest for guilty descendents who must resign themselves to
responsibility for past crimes, even where relations are "remote and
perhaps even unrecognized," and indeed may be "involuntary" (p. 83).
In a very disturbing conclusion, Oshana recommends the unhealthy
sentiments of "shame, embarrassment, and injured pride" as appropriate
starting points for "atonement" of moral errors in which the
descendent-individuals had no part.
Bill Wringe’s "Collective Action and the Peculiar Evil of Genocide"
represents a refreshing return to moral reality, as he wrestles with
the problematic term "evil" introduced by Card. He settles upon a very
helpful explanation of this mythico-religiously baggage-laden term,
as an "intuition" that is characterized by a peculiar reaction.
In opposition to Card’s opening paper in this series, Wringe asserts
that the intuition of genocide as an "evil" is not satisfied by
the mere notion of social death (p. 101). While social death is no
doubt devastating for ethnic communities, not even the Holocaust can
rightly be said to have truly suffered a "death" of their cultural
heritage. Without a paradigm example of social death, Wringe doubts
that this phrase captures the harm experienced in the intuition of
"evil" that we feel in relation to all genocides. Wringe then fleshes
out the harm distinctively captured by the intuition: "disregard
of and disrespect for [the victims’] embodied rationality and hence
their humanity" (p. 106). Social death speaks to the harm to cultural
identity, but the intuition of genocide’s "evil" speaks to its attack
on humanity. Genocide is a crime of a higher order.
Stephen Winter’s "On the Possibility of Group Injury" makes a stronger
case for victim collective identity than the essays addressing
perpetrator identity. "Group injury grounded in ethical individualism
need not be simply reducible to individual interests," argues Winter,
but because groups are damaged as groups by radical violence, their
descendents often share in the harms suffered directly by their
ancestors. Rodney Roberts continues the meditation upon victim groups
and their right to rectificatory compensation for historical sufferings
in "The Counterfactual Conception of Compensation," showing that our
ideas about reparation to victim groups are hopelessly utopian. Since
it is impossible to determine what would have happened if a certain
historical injustice had not occurred, it is equally absurd to claim
that injustices can be set to right. Indeed, argues Roberts, the
compensation may just as well constitute a further injustice (p. 135).
Roberts offers as example a tale of a reckless taxi driver who breaks
my leg by crashing his car, thereby causing me to miss my airline
flight, which crashes and kills all passengers. Calculations of
what would have happened had the taxi driver been a more careful
driver would conclude with my owing him, rather than his owing me
for his negligence. Roberts claims that this example is as absurd as
the descendants of African slaves claiming compensation for personal
injury from the historical injustice of slavery, since, argues Roberts,
these descendents owe their very existence to the institution of
slavery. On the other hand, Roberts concedes that they would have a
good claim to compensations for continuing patterns of social abuse
perpetrated by the institution of slavery and for deeply embedded
personal attitudes and policy assumptions endorsed by morality and
law at the time of slavery in so far as this history continues to
have detrimental effects upon their lives (p. 140).
Haig Khatchadourian distinguishes reparative justice from a broader
notion of compensatory justice in "Compensation and Reparation as
Forms of Compensatory Justice." Where reparative justice requires
that a party guilty of some historical harm is acknowledged as
directly owing of compensation to a victim group, compensatory
justice may offer an alternative that can more readily heal
post-genocidal communities. Compensatory justice does not require
such a wrong, an identifiable injurer, or an acknowledgement of
culpability. In compensatory justice, society is seen to compensate
victims without attending to perpetrator identity, much as in the
case of natural disasters or accidents where perpetrators do not
enter the discussion of what is owed to victims. This notion of
compensation offers a healthy outlet for perpetrator descendents
who may wish to see victims satisfied so they can move forward from
their ancestors’ wrongs (say, in the case of the Armenian Genocide)
but feel forced to deny the historical crime because they are loathe
to accept the label of genocideurs. Denial strives to wipe out the
indignity from the record of history, but victims experience denial
as a continuing affront to their dignity and the dignity of their
ancestor-victims. Khatchadourian’s notion of compensation offers them
an alternative.
Ernesto Verdeja explores the implications of reparations for
post-atrocity transitions toward democracy in "A Normative Theory of
Reparations in Transitional Democracies." Focusing upon Latin American
nations, Verdeja recommends an official apology and reparations to
victims of atrocities as crucial to the healing the factionalism
of war-torn populations, and to achieving the goal of establishing
equitable liberal institutions. Reparations allow a sense of a
communal "we" to arise from a fragmented population, and an apology
can strengthen public trust in the emergent government.
Larry May’s "Prosecuting Military Leaders for War Crimes" examines
the legal foundations by which military and political leaders can
be held to account for violations of international humanitarian
law. May insists that, where minor figures are too often sacrificed
as scapegoats to satisfy calls for justice from the international
community, it is crucial that leaders rather than foot-soldiers be
primary targets of war crimes prosecution. Only leaders satisfy
the mens rea component of criminal culpability that should be a
key indicator of guilt in war crimes and crimes against humanity,
argues May, so leaders must be held responsible for the crimes of
their subordinates and deprived of the defense of ignorance to their
actions of their troops.
Nir Eiskovits argues for the moral importance of truth commissions in
post-atrocity reconciliations in his ""Rethinking the Legitimacy of
Truth Commissions." Reasoning from Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy,
Eiskovits asserts that political and social reconciliation requires an
"active sympathy," that is only achieved by a detailed exposure of
the perpetrator community to the particular circumstances of their
victims’ suffering.
William Bradford closes the volume with his "Acknowledging and
Rectifying the Genocide of the American Indians." A responsible
treatment of what is owed to victims of historical violences would
remain incomplete without addressing the peculiar harms effected by
300 years of dehumanizing treatment of the aboriginals of U.S.
territories. Bradford argues for recognition of the harms done
as harms of genocide, and for justice as "indigenism"–that is,
a profound rethinking of the premises underlying current relations
with the indigenous. Indians and non-Indians are now forced by
history to occupy a common geographical home; their interdependence,
argues Bradford, requires reconciliation that can only be achieved by
acknowledging the original crimes and by accepting American Indians
as a sovereign and independent nation, worthy of self-determination.
Bradford counsels seven concrete steps to reconciliation
(acknowledgement, apology, peacemaking, commemoration, symbolic
compensation, land restoration, and reconciliation).
This volume is a welcome addition to the wealth of scholarship
on the topic of genocide, important for the heretofore penury of
philosophical attention to this phenomenon. The reflections treat
from many diverse angles the philosophical aspects of genocide: who
counts as a victim? a perpetrator? Is responsibility inherited? How
broad should responsibility for past atrocities extend? How can victim
and perpetrator communities move forward in the interests of future
peace and for the sake of justice? This volume will be found valuable
reading, if troubling and controversial in parts, by any educated
adult and would also be useful as a provocative text in university
studies of genocide.
© 2007 Wendy C. Hamblet
Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., C.C.C. Reg., S.A.C. (Dip.), Assistant
Professor, Division of University Studies, North Carolina A&T State
University
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