GENOCIDAL MUTATION AND THE CHALLENGE OF DEFINITION

Abstract: The optimum definition of the term “genocide” has been hotly contested almost since the term was coined. Definitional boundaries determine which acts are covered and excluded and thus to a great extent which cases will benefit from international attention, intervention, prosecution, and reparation. The extensive legal, political, and scholarly discussions prior to this article have typically (1) assumed “genocide” to be a fixed social object and attempted to define it as precisely as possible or (2) assumed the need for a fixed convention and sought to stipulate the range of events that should be denoted by the term. Even if its meaning is a matter of convention, however, “genocide” is not a fixed object but varies by context and evolves in methods and forms over time. In fact, as relevant laws, legal interpretations, and political commitments develop, so do would‐be perpetrators modify what genocide is in order to avoid political and legal consequences. This article advances an approach to a definition of “genocide” that allows even legal definitions to keep pace with this evolutionary process.     

Claudia Card's Concept of Social Death: A New Way of Looking at Genocide

Scholarship in the multidisciplinary field of genocide studies often emphasizes body counts and the number of biological deaths as a way of measuring and comparing the severity and scope of individual genocides. The prevalence of this way of framing genocide is problematic insofar it risks marginalizing the voices and experiences of victims who may not succumb to biological death but nevertheless suffer the loss of family members and other loved ones, and suffer the destruction of relationships, as well as the foundational institutions that give rise to and sustain those relationships. The concept of social death, which Claudia Card offers as the central evil of genocide, marks a radical shift in conceptualizing genocide and provides space for recovering the marginalized voices of many who suffer the evils of genocide but do not suffer biological death. Here her concept of social death is explored, defended, and criticized.     

Genocide and Mass Killing: Origins, Prevention, Healing and Reconciliation

This article focuses on intense collective violence, especially mass killing and genocide. It briefly presents a conception of their origins, with new elements in the conception and comparisons with other approaches. Various aspects of genocide and mass killing are considered, including their starting points (such as difficult life conditions and group conflict), cultural characteristics, psychological and social processes (such as destructive ideologies), the evolution of increasing violence and its effect on perpetrators and bystanders, and the roles of leaders and of internal and external bystanders. Actions that might be taken by the community of nations and other actors to halt or prevent violence are described. In considering prevention there is a focus on processes of healing within previously victimized groups and reconciliation between hostile groups. A project on healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation in Rwanda is briefly described.     

A Century of Silence

This paper addresses how crimes of genocide go beyond a need for naked power, economic aggrandizement, or territorial conquest. Such crimes involve psychogenic and psychodynamic underpinnings that can be terrifying to contemplate. Yet their psychological study is essential. The Armenian genocide has been taken as a point of reference. Because the Armenian genocide has resulted in nearly a century-long effort of perpetrator denial, it can provide an important case study of how long-standing trauma and denial reinforce each other and illuminate each other. As a result, this genocide has aptly been called the “secret genocide,” the “unremembered genocide,” and a “crime without a name.” The author holds that genocidal trauma (and trauma in general) is contagious and the contagion is likely to be insidious. All who come in contact with it can come away marked, including victim, victim families and progeny, observers, advocates, researchers, and yes, perpetrators.     

"God must have been sleeping": faith as an obstacle and a resource for Rwandan genocide survivors in the United States

In 1994, 1 million Rwandans were violently killed in only 100 days. Devastating for some Rwandan survivors was the significant role that some Catholic parishes and leaders took in ignoring, facilitating, and even perpetuating the genocide. This article seeks to understand how Rwandan genocide survivors draw on religion as they negotiate their postgenocide identities in the United States and comprehend their current faiths, beliefs, and practices. Based on qualitative interviews with Rwandan survivors now located within the United States, I argue that the experiences of religiosity postgenocide serve as both an obstacle and a resource in postgenocide life, creating significant individual and local ramifications for community engagement, reconciliation, and trauma recovery.     

Genocide,Diversity, and John Dewey's Progressive Education

This article discusses how John Dewey's “Report and Recommendation upon Turkish Education” (published in 1924) and some of Dewey's related travel narratives reflect “civilizing mission” imperatives and involve multiple utopian operations that have not yet attracted political‐philosophical attention. Such critical attention would reveal Dewey's misjudgments concerning issues of diversity, geopolitics, and global justice. Based on an ethicopolitical reading of the relevant sources, the aim here is to expose developmentalist and colonial vestiges, to raise searching questions, and to obtain a heightened view on the stakes of Dewey's utopianism and progressive pragmatism. The article concludes that the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide constitutes a major challenge to Dewey scholarship.     

Christ, Spirit and Atonement

The Christian doctrine of the atonement is complex, not least in part because it must hold together the integrity of both divine and human being. Too often attempts to expound theologies of atonement have foundered because they have pitted divine and human action in competition one with the other. This article addresses itself to this problematic by suggesting three minimum conditions which must be met if this doctrine is to a give a theologically plausible account of salvation: first, that divine and human activity not be identified; second, that divine and human activity not be co-ordinated so as to complete or complement each other; and third, that neither divine nor human activity be rendered superfluous. The article elaborates upon these conditions by taking as its test case the Christian claim: God was in Christ.     

On Two Main Themes in Gutting's What Philosophers Know

This paper addresses each of two of Gutting's three main contentions: that like anyone else, philosophers are entitled to begin with what they find obvious and that philosophy has produced a distinctive body of knowledge. I emphatically agree with the first contention and expand on it, defending a stronger claim. The second contention I dispute, in spirit if not in letter, on each of several grounds.     

When God Smites: Talking with Students about the Violence of God in Scripture

This article emphasizes the need for religious educators to address the issue of divine violence in Scripture with students, and it offers various pedagogical strategies for doing so. The focus is on violent Old Testament texts, with special attention given to the issue of Canaanite genocide. A general framework for structuring class time around divine violence in Scripture is proposed which includes (1) encouraging students to encounter violent biblical texts firsthand, (2) helping them understand why people find these passages problematic, and (3) offering various options for dealing with the potential problems these passages raise. In the second half of the article, significant attention is devoted to a number of practical considerations that should be taken into account when talking about this sensitive issue in class. A brief word about assessment is offered at the end.     

Notes on Cultures of Violence, Cultures of Caring and Peace, and the Fulfillment of Basic Human Needs

Some conditions in the lives of children, adults, and groups can be construed as fulfilling universal human psychological needs. The constructive fulfillment of these basic needs promotes caring and positive, helpful relations; their frustration creates an inclination toward hostility and aggression. The article describes diverse influences that can lead to violence between individuals, groups, and societies, as well as ways to halt and prevent genocide, mass killing, and other intergroup violence, including terrorism, in part by fostering culture changes that promote harmony and peace. Ideally such culture change would involve healing from past wounds, the creation of positive (rather than destructive) ideologies, supportive communities, reconciliation and the creation of a shared collective memory, education that promotes peace, and the development of inclusive caring in children. The article also refers to work in Rwanda that aims to foster healing and reconciliation, in part by helping people understand the roots of violence and its implication for prevention. Societies and families that help to fulfill basic needs promote goodness as well as optimal human functioning—the continued growth and development of individuals.     

Testimonies in the Treatment of Genocidal Trauma

This article describes an approach to the treatment of genocide survivors that addresses both the personal and communal/historical dimensions of their experiences. I begin by outlining the characteristics of massive psychic trauma as background for using video testimonies in the treatment of Holocaust survivors. I then discuss videotaped interviews with perpetrators as an illustrative contrast to survivors' testimonies. The third section explains my position as a psychoanalyst encountering historical trauma and its relationship to my own experiences as a survivor. Following a brief history of videotaping as a medium for recording testimonies, I conclude by demonstrating the ways in which active listening can lead to the revelation of new dimensions of historical as well as personal truth.     

Simulating individual word identification thresholds and errors in the fragmentation task

This article presents a large-scale study that collected word identification thresholds and errors in the fragmentation task for all four-letter French words. In the first part of this article, we identify some of the variables (e.g., word frequency, neighborhood size, letter confusability) that affect performance in the fragmentation task. In the second part, we analyze individual response performance and identify different response strategies. We demonstrate that the interactive activation model can account for individual response strategies by adapting two of its original parameters: word-letter feedback and letter-word inhibition. In the third part, we demonstrate that the adaptation of the interactive activation model to the fragmentation task makes it possible to successfully simulate a facilitatory frequency effect on identification thresholds, an inhibitory neighborhood size effect on error rates, and an inhibitory letter confusability effect on identification thresholds. When the task-specific processes of the fragmentation task are specified and individual response strategies are considered, the interactive activation model provides a parsimonious architecture for modeling the task-independent processes involved in word perception.     

Holocaust Humor and Our Aesthetic Sensibility of American Genocide

The specific form of holocaust humor that I will address—as developed by comedians Larry David, Sarah Silverman, Rachel Bloom, Ilana Glazer, and Abbi Jacobson—is neither trivial nor trivializes the suffering of the Jews but rather can expose the complicity of our narratives about the holocaust with our own white indifference to the pervasive ruthlessness of American genocide against black communities and our failure to bear witness to the survival of certain genocidal logics from the past in the American present.     

Holocaust Abuse

This essay reconsiders the category of “Holocaust denial” as the marked indicator of ethical transgression in Holocaust historiography within American civil religion. It maintains that the present category excludes and thereby enables other violations of responsible Holocaust historiography. To demonstrate the nature and gravity of such violations, the essay engages the widespread claim that Hajj Muhammad Amin al‐Husayni, the former mufti of Jerusalem, was an instigator, promoter, or “driving spirit” of the Nazi genocide against Jews, and the associated suggestions of wider Arab and Muslim complicity. The essay uncovers the history of the Husayni narrative in question, the dramatic circumstances in which it emerged, its role in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, and its rediscovery and misuse within American popular and political circles over the past two decades. Such misuse, it concludes, corrodes Holocaust recognition within American civil religion and demonstrates the need for a revision of the socially accepted ethical boundary for responsible Holocaust historiography.     

Complicity and Criminal Liability in Rwanda: A Situationist Critique

In Complicity and the Rwandan Genocide (2010b), Larry May argues that complicity can be the basis for criminal liability if two conditions are met: First, the person’s actions or inactions must contribute to the harm in question, and secondly, the person must know that his actions or inactions risk contributing to this harm. May also states that the threshold for guilt for criminal liability is higher than for moral responsibility. I agree with this latter claim, but I think that it casts doubt on May’s account of criminal liability, particular in so-called performance cases in which low-level participants merely fail to help. This is because it is far from clear that passive non-helpers are morally responsible for their participation in widespread harms. Situationism purports to show that passive bystanders typically are not morally responsible for their role in such harms, because they were behaving reasonably subject to the constraints they faced. In this paper, I assess this claim, and defend it on the basis of O. W. Holmes’ standard of the reasonable person as a guide to judging criminal complicity. Finally, I provide a situationist account of the Rwandan genocide, which focuses on the systemic causes and primary perpetrators of the genocide, rather than low-level participants.     

Negation,anti-realism,and the denial defence

Here is one argument against realism. (1) Realists are committed to the classical rules for negation. But (2) legitimate rules of inference must conserve evidence. And (3) the classical rules for negation do not conserve evidence. So (4) realism is wrong. Most realists reject 2. But it has recently been argued that if we allow denied sentences as premisses and conclusions in inferences we will be able to reject 3. And this new argument against 3 generates a new response to the anti-realist argument: keep 1 and 2, avoiding 4 by rejecting 3. My aim in this paper is to see how much work in the fight against anti-realism this new response can really do. I argue that there is a powerful objection to the response: 2 is in tension with the claim that denied sentences can be premisses and conclusions in inferences. But I show that, even given this objection, the new response has an important role to play.     

Color realism and color science

The target article is an attempt to make some progress on the problem of color realism. Are objects colored? And what is the nature of the color properties? We defend the view that physical objects (for instance, tomatoes, radishes, and rubies) are colored, and that colors are physical properties, specifically, types of reflectance. This is probably a minority opinion, at least among color scientists. Textbooks frequently claim that physical objects are not colored, and that the colors are "subjective" or "in the mind." The article has two other purposes: First, to introduce an interdisciplinary audience to some distinctively philosophical tools that are useful in tackling the problem of color realism and, second, to clarify the various positions and central arguments in the debate. The first part explains the problem of color realism and makes some useful distinctions. These distinctions are then used to expose various confusions that often prevent people from seeing that the issues are genuine and difficult, and that the problem of color realism ought to be of interest to anyone working in the field of color science. The second part explains the various leading answers to the problem of color realism, and (briefly) argues that all views other than our own have serious difficulties or are unmotivated. The third part explains and motivates our own view, that colors are types of reflectances and defends it against objections made in the recent literature that are often taken as fatal.     

Intellectual Humility,Confidence, and Argumentation

In this paper, I explore the relationship of virtue, argumentation, and philosophical conduct by considering the role of the specific virtue of intellectual humility in the practice of philosophical argumentation. I have three aims: first, to sketch an account of this virtue; second, to argue that it can be cultivated by engaging in argumentation with others; and third, to problematize this claim by drawing upon recent data from social psychology. My claim is that philosophical argumentation can be conducive to the cultivation of virtues, including humility, but only if it is conceived and practiced in appropriately ‘edifying’ ways.