Wisconsin Public Television University Place  Genocide and Social Death Claudia Card  April 22, 2103 UP863  cc >> It's my great pleasure to introduce my colleague, Claudia Card, who is a UW Alum. I'm not going to tell you exactly when she graduated, but she's one of ours. After having taken her undergraduate degree here, she went off to Harvard to earn her PhD. During the point at which she was completing her PhD she came back to her Alma Mater and began teaching for us, and has been doing for about 47 years. Not only is Professor Card a member of our department, she's also affiliated with the Jewish Studies program, the Women's Studies program, the Institute for Environmental Studies and the LGBTQ Studies program as well. She's the author of four books. She's edited six more. She's the author of over 90 articles, many of which are reprinted in anthologies and translated into a variety of languages. Professor Card has delivered over 300 talks in her career. She's currently working on two books, an introduction to feminist philosophy, and a third in a trilogy on evil. 

This first two installments of which were published to great acclaim, The Atrocity Paradigm, that was published by Oxford University Press in 2006 and Confronting Evils published by Cambridge in 2010. Professor Card has earned a number of awards including the Distinguished Woman Philosopher of the Year in 1996, and the NEH, an ACLS award. She's been a resident fellow with the Institute for Research and Humanities here, as well as a senior fellow. And she's won the university's Hilldale Award, a kind of capstone career award for excellence in teaching service and research. She's been a past-president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association. And her work has been the subject of three volumes of collected essays by those who've been impressed by her impact within the field. Professor Card has been an influential mentor to generations of graduate students here at UW. She is renowned for her groundbreaking work in feminist philosophy, and in moral philosophy more generally. She's been quite generous with her time, giving dozens of public lectures. This is only the latest of which, and over 20 times she's been invited to talk on the radio and on television. 

I hope you'll join me enthusiastically in welcoming my colleague, Claudia Card, who will be talking this night about genocide and social death. [applause]  >> Thank you, Russ, for that generous introduction. Genocide has become the paradigm atrocity of our time. Etymologically, the word "genocide" which was coined less than a century ago, should mean the killing of a tribe. But most victims of genocide today are not what we would naturally call tribes. For this reason, among others, not everyone understands genocide in the same way. The International Association of Genocide Scholars asks on its membership application form, what definition of genocide do you use in your work? Here are some questions commonly asked by those who think about genocide and those who may have obligations to respond to genocides. The basic philosophical question would naturally be, what is a genocide? Under that, widely discussed questions are, how does it differ from non-genocidal mass-murder, such as the Oklahoma City bombing or the Tokyo subway gassing, the bombings of 9/11, or even the Columbine High School massacre? Is mass murder even necessary for genocide? As a crime, is genocide redundant, given the already existing war crimes and crimes against humanity? That is, does it identify something new? Is genocide the worst crime, or the most evil, that you can imagine? Against what kinds of groups can genocide be committed? Could there, for example, be a gay genocide? Would femicide be a kind of genocide? What about people with disabilities? What about evil groups? What kinds of acts can be genocidal? What underlies the judgment that genocide is never justifiable or even excusable? I begin with the idea that genocide is the murder of a people or other significant community. My hypothesis is that social death is utterly central to the idea of murdering a people. Social death is a concept I borrow from historian Orlando Patterson's book, Slavery and Social Death, which was published in 1982. 

You'll see on your handout, on the back, there's a bibliography of works, some of which I will refer to, and others of which I have found helpful. Patterson used the concept of social death to describe the plight of slaves who were captured in Africa and survived the middle passage to the Americas. They were torn from their roots, chained together with others who spoke different languages. And in the New World they were robbed of the security of even their own family connections by the practice of selling off children, spouses, and other kin. In the Americas, Patterson argued, relationships among slaves had no social security, and so slaves, he concluded, were socially dead. Later generations of slaves who were born to a condition of social death were said by Patterson to be natally alienated, cut off from social ties in both directions, both to their ancestors and to their progeny. These are controversial hypotheses among historians of slavery in the Americas who take seriously the idea of a slave culture. To the extent that those critics are right about slave culture, genocides may offer clearer instances of social death than slavery offered, at least, slavery in the Americas. To understand social death, I start with the idea of social vitality, and then understand social death as a deprivation or loss of social vitality. By social vitality I understand the meanings, shapes, and contents given to the lives of individuals by social relationships, both personal and institutional, contemporary and intergenerational, that unite them into a people or other significant community. 

Social vitality takes many forms. Linguistic, educational, political, economic, artistic, and religious institutions all contribute, as do friendship and kinship networks. Major loss of social vitality is a loss of social identity, and consequently, a serious loss of meaning for your existence. Putting social death at the center takes the focus off body counts, and puts it instead on the kinds of relationships that give meaning to the lives of individuals. Social death, so understood, has degrees, and as we will see, it typically has stages. Sometimes, social vitality is recoverable or re-creatable in new forms. Often it is not. Social death sounds like something suffered by a group. It is. But what makes social death morally significant is that it is suffered by individuals, members of the group, in virtue of their group membership. 

It robs their lives of meaning, or robs them of the ability to give meaning to their lives, and in so doing, robs them of fundamental aspects of their humanity. The social death of individuals can have other sources than genocide; slavery, banishment, disfigurement, illness, even self-chosen isolation, becoming a hermit. But in most of these cases, one is not ordinarily cut off from a shared language, history, traditions, and so on. In genocide, social death is extreme. I take seriously Nietzsche's observation that only what has no history is definable, that is, in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. And so, I want to leave the notion of being "utterly central" relatively undefined. But when I say that social death is utterly central, I mean at least that it is a salient characteristic of most paradigm instances. Also, that it is a useful concept for appreciating the kind of evil that genocide is. Social death enables us to distinguish genocide from other mass atrocities. It is useful for explaining in what sense genocide is a form of murder and how it differs from other murders. 

It helps for identifying the sorts of human groups that can be victims of genocide, which is a matter of some consequence in international law. It should be useful for identifying a genocide-in-progress, where intervention might interrupt it before it ran its course. It is a gross understatement to say genocide is wrong. Genocide is not just wrong. It is an evil, and not in the popular loose sense of "evil" that applies to anything bad or wrong but in that stricter, narrower, more specific sense in which "evil" is a very strong term of approbrium. According to some, including my teacher, Emeritus Professor Marcus Singer, it is the strongest term of approbrium available to us. For the past decade and a half, I have focused my research and writing on evils and the concept of evil. In doing so, I have taken on two tasks. First, I try to distinguish evils from lesser wrongs and lesser bads. Evils, on my view, are not just worse, they are also more complex. 

The second kind of task has been to work through some tough moral and conceptual questions regarding particular evils, especially, torture, terrorism, and genocide. To give you a quick overview, I come to different conclusions regarding terrorism, torture, and genocide. In the case of terrorism, I found I had to allow the possibility that in some circumstances, in response to some atrocities, there are forms of terrorism that are not evils, even if they are wrong, but those forms do not include torture or genocide. And by the way, genocide tends to include both torture and terrorism. The reason I find some forms of terrorism not evils is not that they are not extremely harmful, obviously they are, but that they can be if not justifiable, then at least partly excusable. In the case of torture, I defend the view that torture is an evil that should never be on the table as a permissible option, whether for an individual or a government, whether for a particular act or as a policy, even though, like slavery, torture is not wrong by definition. We can construct logically possible cases in which all the alternatives appear worse. I appeal, rather, to the moral costs of torture as well as to empirical probabilities regarding what we can know and what we can control. Because neither torture nor terrorism is wrong by definition, there is room for argument about their justifiability or excusability. In contrast, if genocide is understood as the murder of a people, there is no room for argument regarding its justifiability. 

Murder is, by definition, wrongful. Homicide can be justified, in self-defense, for example, murder cannot. Killing in justifiable self-defense is not murder. In this respect, the philosopher who confronts the phenomena of genocide is in a position analogous to that of the philosopher who confronts the phenomena of rape. The question is not when, if ever, it is justified. The questions are, rather, how we are to recognize instances of it and how it might be morally justifiable to respond. And yet, it might seem an arbitrary stipulation, it seemed so to some of my first year FIG students a couple years ago, to say that genocide is wrong by definition. So I'll have more to say about that and in defense of my view that it is not an arbitrary stipulation. No scholars or politicians that I know of who have tried to define genocide have taken the view that it could ever be anything but wrong. The genocide convention of 1948 took as its task the definition of a crime that had not previously been defined in international law. 

Still, it is a philosophically interesting question how, apart from size of the target, destroying an evil group differs from genocide. Consider, for example, the organization known in the 1940s as "Murder, Inc." and later as "the Syndicate" and "the Mob." This organization was described by authors of the book Murder, Inc. as a "fantastic ring of killers and extortionists" that constituted organized crime in the United States. They report that in one decade, Murder, Inc. was responsible for a thousand murders "from New England to California." If you think this group was too small or too thin to constitute a people, then, consider the Ku Klux Klan, a group much larger and more complex in its activities. When sociologist Kathy Blee interviewed women in Indiana who had been members of the Klan in the 1920s, they described it nostalgically as a way to socialize with like-minded others. Or, consider the Nazi Party. One reason I cite Murder, Inc. and the Klan is that I don't like to always be citing Nazis. [laughter] It seems more appropriate for me, as an American, to mention homegrown evil organizations. The vitality contributed to the lives of members of these organizations was easily as important to their lives as the vitality contributed by a national or religious culture. Many mass atrocities are recognized as genocides even though it is not clear that their victims are, strictly speaking, a people. 

The Cambodian genocide, for example, in which both perpetrators and victims belonged to the same people. On the view that social death is central to genocide, it should be natural to ask whether it would be committing genocide to destroy an evil group that gave meaning to the lives of its members. If it were, we could no longer define "genocide" as the "murder of a people" but would have to allow the possibility of justified genocides. I regard this as "the Murder, Inc. problem," and I will return to it. To show that genocide is always an evil, it is necessary first to say something about what conception of evil is in play here, and I turn to that next. Mine, of course. In my first evil book, The Atrocity Paradigm, I developed a theory of evil that takes large-scale mass atrocities as paradigms. By a "paradigm," I mean an uncontroversial instance, something that is uncontroversially an evil. If large-scale mass atrocities are not evils, I cannot imagine what would be. My approach is secular. 

I do not presuppose a theological context, although my approach is compatible with most aspects of the theological problem of evil, which ponders how an omnipotent and perfectly good creator could create a world as flawed by evils as ours. My initial definition was that evils are, "reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms, produced, maintained, aggravated, supported, and so on by culpable wrongdoing." I changed "culpable wrongdoing" to "inexcusable wrongs" in my second evil book, that is, Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, and Genocide. The resulting revised definition is that evils are reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms, produced, maintained, aggravated, supported, and so on by inexcusable wrongs. So understood, evils have two basic, irreducibly distinct component, an agency component and a harm component, connected by reasonably foreseeable causality. Notice that I take the noun "evils," plural, as the basic concept. I am not interested in the idea of evil as a mysterious or metaphysical force. I treat adjectival uses of "evil" as derivative from the noun use. An evil intention, for example, is an intention, without excuse, to do reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm. An evil practice is one that inexcusably does reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm. A practice that is inexcusable today might have been excusable in the past, not then an evil but an evil today. 

Perhaps some forms of slavery My motivating interest is in identifying deeds, practices, and institutions that are evils, not in labeling perpetrators, even though I think that can sometimes be done. I want to highlight more the plight of victims and resist becoming immersed in perpetrator psychology. This is an ethical conception of evils in that it presupposes the idea of moral wrongs. Atrocities do not include natural catastrophes, although natural catastrophes can be just as harmful. I will not try to define "wrongs." But my definition of evils is compatible with many non-utilitarian theories of the distinction between right and wrong. Key concepts that require clarification then are "intolerable" in the "intolerable harm," and "inexcusable" in "inexcusable wrongs." To show that social death is necessarily evil I need to to show that it's intolerably harmful. I take it that's obvious, so I'm not going to spend any time on that. That it's always wrong. There's where I'm going to focus my attention. And that there's no excuse for it. 

To show that there's no excuse for it would require me to get into perpetrator psychology in a way that I don't want to do tonight.  By intolerable harms what I mean is substantial deprivations of basics that are ordinarily necessary for a life or a death to be decent. That is, decent for the person whose life or death it is. Such basics, in the case of a life include such things as access to non-toxic air, water, and food, the ability to move your limbs, to sit, stand, or lie down, to make choices and act on some of them, to have affective bonds with others and interaction with some of them, to be free from severe and unremitting pain or humiliation, and so on. These are things that cut across cultural differences and stem from our common needs, not only as members of a species but as mammals. How much deprivation? Enough to make a life or death indecent, and so intolerable, for the person whose life or death it is. What makes a harm intolerable is not primarily a matter of subjective preference, even if subjective preference is not totally eliminable. This is a normative conception of the intolerable, not what you cannot in fact tolerate but more like what you shouldn't have to. Millions tolerate the intolerable daily. Next, let's consider inexcusable wrongs. 

Wrongs can be inexcusable in either of two ways, and evils are inexcusable in both. First, what I call a metaphysical excuse exists when you act under diminished capacity, such as physical disability or mental illness. Second, what I call a moral excuse exists when you have a partial moral justification. There is some excuse, morally speaking, when you have some good moral reason for what you did, even though that reason is not good enough to justify your deed on the whole. What is justified, of course, needs no excuse. There is usually some reason for any deed. But not every reason carries moral weight. When it does not, if the deed is wrong, there is no moral excuse for it. Evils, on my view, are inexcusable both metaphysically and morally. Perhaps it is too strong to say there is absolutely no moral or metaphysical excuse for an evil. 

It may be more plausible to say there is nothing approaching a very good moral reason, allowing that there may be trivial ones, and there is no significantly diminished capacity to act, allowing for the possibility of some degree of difficulty. Those are basically friendly amendments. Further, as I understand a moral reason, a reason that carries some moral weight for some deeds may carry none at all for other deed. For example, the fact that someone's feelings would be hurt if you did or didn't do something carries some moral weight as a reason to not always speak frankly, but carries no moral weight at all as a reason to kill someone. The etymology of "genocide" leaves open the question whether it is necessarily an evil. The word "genocide," as I mentioned, is of relatively recent origin. It was not a crime charged at Nuremberg in 1945. But scholars tend to agree that the practice is ancient, extending at least back to the 5th century destruction of the people of the island of Melos by the Athenians. Archeological evidence suggests that it goes probably further back than recorded history. By the way, although the destruction of the people of the island of Melos is generally regarded as a genocide, the Athenians did not kill everyone. 

They killed the men, and enslaved women and children which was a common practice at the time. The result was that the people of the island was destroyed as a people. The hybrid term "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin who was a Polish Jewish attorney who came to the United States as a refugee from Hitler. He combined the Greek "genos" which meant tribe or race, with the Latin "cide," killing, to form the hybrid "genocide," the "killing, or cutting down, of a people." Genocide is one of those Greek/Latin hybrid concepts, like homosexual, where "homo" means "same," as in Greek, not "man," as in Latin; anthropocentric, human centered, is another. The Latin "cide" is from a verb that meant "to cut down." It could be applied cutting down trees but was also used to mean "to kill." I have to thank to my colleagues who read Latin for this bit of information, Steve Nadler and Paula Gottlieb. And so, etymology seems to leave open the question of justifiability, which means that more needs to be said to justify understanding genocide as not just a kind of destruction but as a kind of murder. Knowing something of the history of Lemkin's coinage of this concept is helpful. Lemkin began agitating for an international recognition of the crime of genocide in the 1930s. His paradigm was the Turks' slaughter of the Armenian Christians in 1915, under cover of WWI and led by Talat Pasha, one of the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress that controlled the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The slaughter of the Armenians was also a paradigm for Hitler, who asked, "Who today speaks of the Armenians?" To this day, Turkey denies that the slaughter of the Armenians was a genocide, and the United States officially agrees, presumably to maintain good relations with Turkey. 

But there appears to be consensus among genocide scholars that it was. Lemkin's issue was this: Piracy was a crime under international law, but there was no crime for which Talat Pasha could be prosecuted under international law for master-minding the slaughter of the Armenians. This struck Lemkin as absurd; surely, the extermination of a people is worse than an act of piracy. Eventually, Talat Pasha was assassinated by a young Armenian survivor, Soghomon Tehlirian who was then tried and acquitted on grounds that we would call today "temporary insanity." Again, Lemkin was outraged. This time he was outraged that it could be a prosecutable crime for Tehlirian to assassinate Talat Pasha but not a crime for Talat Pasha to have the Armenians slaughtered, and that the only way to hold Talat Pasha accountable was assassination, rather than due process of law. And so Lemkin agitated for years for an international convention to define the crime of genocide. It took place in 1948.  The 1948 Genocide Convention was accepted by the U.N. the same month as the International Declaration of Human Rights. Its definition is the most widely cited. "Genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a nation, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such-- And here are the following acts; killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." Not until the 1990s was this Convention actually enforced. 

The United States did not ratify it until the late 1980s under President Reagan. Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire had made a speech to the Senate every day for 19 years urging its ratification. Every clause of the U.N. definition has been controversial: the scope and content of "intent," the meaning of "in whole or in part," and the scope of the whole definition: is it too narrow because it names only four kinds of groups and only five kinds of activity? Does it threaten to be too broad, because of the non-homicidal acts it includes as apparently sufficient when coupled with the right sort of intent? Let's start with intent. If intent is understood narrowly to mean aim, then the destruction of a people as a reasonably foreseeable consequence that was neither an aim nor a means to an aim would not count, on this definition, as genocide. It would be merely "collateral damage". And so, for example, the deaths of millions of Native Americans from diseases brought over by Europeans would not count as genocides except where those deaths were aimed at. Using this narrow understanding of "intent," Hugo Adam Bedau who is known for his campaign against the death penalty wrote an essay defending the United States in Vietnam against the charge of genocide raised by the Jean-Paul Sartre/Bertrand Russell genocide convention that was held-- I'll bet you didn't know about that. That was held in 1967 in Stockholm and Copenhagen. But if we understand more broadly as part of one's intent the reasonably foreseeable consequences that one is prepared to accept as the price of attaining one's aim, even though they are not instrumental toward its attainment, then maybe the case of at least some of the Native American nations that died from European diseases is not so clear. 

On this broader understanding of intent, it has been argued that Josef Stalin's economic policies that resulted in the starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants in 1932-33 were genocidal, because those consequences were utterly foreseeable by those who were responsible. It was not a means but a price that Stalin was willing to pay to achieve his aims. I'll save, for the moment, the questions regarding "in whole or in part," because addressing those questions will lead me to Lemkin's alternative definition of genocide. Regarding the scope of the U.N. definition, the question of narrowness has been raised both in regard to the acts and in regard to the groups enumerated. In regard to acts, some have asked why only these and not others, such as forcible expulsion or rape aimed at enforced pregnancy? But the U.N. definition, as stated, does not preclude a continuation of the list of acts. It doesn't say these are the only ones. Since the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia, it has come to be widely understood that mass rape can be among acts constitutive of genocide. That war also raises the question of mass expulsion, which should get us to think about whether Spain's expulsions of the Jews in the late 15th century and of the Moriscos in the 17th century were instances of genocide. Depending on how it is done, mass expulsion has the potential to become genocidal. 

Expulsion of the Armenian Christians could be argued to be genocidal not only because of the shootings but because of the well-known harsh environmental conditions under which the Armenians were forced to flee. In regard to groups named, many have asked, why limit possible targets of genocide to "national, ethnical, racial, or religious" groups? Why not include political groups? And what about targeting the disabled? What about gays? females? evil groups? Whether to include political groups was controversial during the convention. Political commitments are as important and definitive for some people as religious commitments are for others. Political communities as well as religious communities give meaning and shape to the lives of their members. Some have argued that the definition should include only groups into which you are born, about which you have no choice. But that is not necessarily true of religious groups and national groups. Some prefer the term "politicide" for elimination of political groups, even if the elimination is massively homicidal, and "ethnicide" for cultural genocides that are not massively homicidal. A commonly cited example of "politicide" is Josef Stalin's purges of his perceived political opponents. A commonly cited example of cultural genocide is the transportation and reeducation of children, as was done to Native American children in this country, and to mixed race children in Australia. The apparent objective in each case was assimilation into a cultural group other than their culture of origin, and the policies included such measures as forbidding the children to use their native language or communicate with their families of origin. 

Those who favored including "politicides" in the definition lost at the 1948 convention whereas those who favored including forced cultural assimilations won their point. That inclusion means that, on this definition, a genocide need not be massively homicidal.  A philosophically interesting question that the convention apparently did not consider is the Murder, Inc. problem. What about evil groups? If a group is so evil that its destruction appears to be justified, why should that destruction not count as a genocide? When the Southern Poverty Law Center destroys white supremacist groups by bankrupting them, why is it not committing genocide? Why was de-Nazification not a genocidal process? Dismantling of those groups might sound like condition "c" of the U.N. definition: deliberately imposing conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's destruction. A first response is that these ways of destroying evil organizations still respected the human rights of the members of those organizations. Genocides do not. And that is true. A second response might be that, aside from the truth or falsity of things attributed to members of a people, a people cannot be evil because a people is not the kind of group that can act and so cannot be guilty of inexcusable wrongs. I think that is also true. And yet, some targets of genocide have been groups that can act: the ancient city of Carthage, for example, and the inhabitants of the island of Melos who refused to pay tribute to the Athenians. 

Here is another way to think about what distinguishes the destruction of evil groups from genocides. It is not just that these groups are too small or too thin to constitute a people, although they are. Some peoples are larger and richer, more layered, than others. Sometimes the "tribe" targeted by a genocide is better thought of simply as a community that significantly gives meaning and identity to its members. We might get an interesting answer it we can explain the following disanalogy between killing an evil person and destroying an evil group. Killing an evil person is still murder, unless it is done in self-defense, understood fairly narrowly. The fact that you are evil is not sufficient to justify someone in killing you. But it can be justifiable to destroy an evil group, as the Southern Poverty Law Center does when it bankrupts white supremacist groups with lawsuits. Why is killing an evil group not murder, if killing an evil individual is? A possible rationale is that the principles or projects that a person endorses at a particular time do not define or determine the value of the person. The person is someone who has the capacity to evaluate such things, to adopt or reject them, to discover errors, correct mistaken judgments and identify other mistakes. 

Persons have the capacity to correct or improve themselves, even when they don't do it. With a different set of principles and projects, you are still the same person, morally speaking, who did what you did when you espoused a different set of principles and projects. You may feel like a new person. But you are responsible for all of it. But, for some human groups, for example, some evil organizations principles and projects really do define the organization. There is no way to reject those defining principles while preserving the organization. Other human groups, such as states that have a constitution and organized religions that have processes for re-evaluating and re-interpreting their positions or policies, are, like individuals, capable of self-correction. A people has within itself resources for evaluating positions taken by some of its members, and the value of a people, somewhat like the value of a person, is not a function of particular projects that might be found within it. But organizations like Murder, Inc. have as their raisons d'etre the perpetration of such deeds as murder for hire and extortion. There was no way to eliminate those policies without the organization's ceasing to have its reason for existing. 

There is no meaningful distinction to be drawn here between the principles and projects that define the organization and the organization itself. The German state under Third Reich had too little capability of self-correction. People within Germany tried to get rid of Hitler. There were at least 13 failed attempts, according to one documentary on this topic. But there was no effective internal mechanism, such as impeachment, for doing so. What is destroyed when such a group is destroyed are, basically, the inhumane projects to which it is committed. Likewise with Murder, Inc. and, I suspect, with the Ku Klux Klan. If there is any plausibility in this kind of explanation, then to be a potential target of genocide, it would not be enough that the relationships defining the group in question gave meaning, shape, and content to the lives of their members. They must give a decent sort of meaning, shape, and content. 

The group must, at any rate, not have as its raison d'etre an evil project or set of evil projects. A people is a kind of group that evolves, not something that is ordinarily deliberately constituted, the way an organization is deliberately created. A people as such is not the kind of group that can be said to have defining projects, although a state might have them. But not all peoples have states. The Diaspora Jews and the Sinti and Roma of Europe during the reign of Hitler were peoples without states. Perhaps the idea that it is not necessarily evil to destroy an evil group might partly explain how some ordinary Germans, not Nazis or members of the government or military, could be as complicit as so many were in Hitler's Final Solution. Nazi propaganda portrayed the Jews as an evil people, and paranoid propaganda portrayed that people as embarked on a project of world domination. I don't think the idea of an evil people makes sense; it presupposes that a people can be an agent. But a people does not have enough internal cohesion for that to be the case. That point aside, Nazi propaganda portraying the Jews as an evil people could at best only partly explain the complicity of ordinary Germans. 

For it matters when a group is destroyed how that is done. Individual members of even an evil group would still have human rights. The Southern Poverty Law Center does not kill white supremacists. It bankrupts their organizations. And so, even the misguided and confused belief by ordinary Germans that the Jews were an evil people would not explain their complicity in the killing of individual Jews. I want to move on now from the non-arbitrariness of understanding genocide as a kind of murder, which I don't think it is arbitrary, to consider some other groups that are not mentioned in the U.N. definition. What about the idea of a gay genocide? Would that idea make sense? Gays are not a people or any kind of tribe. If the question is about all the gays in the world, they do not form a community and never have, although there have been many gay communities. Men who were identified as homosexuals and forced to wear the "pink triangle" in Nazi camps suffered losses of social vitality specific to their being gay if they had been members of gay communities. 

Gay communities can shape and animate the lives of their members in positive ways which is especially important in the context of a larger social world that rejects them. Does the forcibly imposed loss of such social vitality constitute a gay genocide? The philosopher James Nickel, in an interesting essay on four ways of getting rid of groups, mentions the case of forcibly re-educating homosexuals as analogous to the forced assimilation of cultural groups, which he regards as not ordinarily genocidal. But the men of the pink triangles were persecuted and ostracized, not re-educated. They resemble victims of a genocide to the extent that their lives had importantly gained positive meaning from gay communities to which they belonged, which were destroyed. Yet those communities were far younger, transitory, in flux and inevitably less richly textured and layered than communities constituted by sharers of a natural language, religion, and multi-generational traditions. Gay communities are like many political communities, and many are political communities, pockets of resistance to prevailing norms. Still, those communities were only part of what gave shape and meanings to the lives of their members. The members of gay communities also had many other communities of origin. Gay communities can have a life-saving impact on those who are otherwise cultural rejects. But many then as now did not belong to gay communities. 

Many have been, and are today, married to someone of another sex. The men most likely to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps were those who met at gay bars or gay parties or were activists. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance concepts is useful for thinking about the extent to which the idea of a gay genocide makes sense. Destruction of gay communities is hardly a paradigm of genocide. But it does bear some relevant similarities and so, when the assault is systematic, it might find a place in the extended family of genocidal assaults. The way to think about it, on the social death hypothesis, is to consider to what extent the destroyed community had contributed meaning and identity to its members and whether the loss of those meanings would leave those individuals socially dead. The idea of a genocide of the disabled stretches the concept of genocide even further. And yet, there are communities built around the needs and interests of persons with specific kinds of disabilities, and it is not impossible that they might be targeted for elimination. Hitler's euthanasia program targeted individuals with disabilities, not communities. But were a tyrant with similar ambitions to come to power today, such communities might be targeted. 

But what some feminist scholars call "femicide," the systematic murder of females, for example, by exposing infants, is not a form of genocide. Females are a class, a category, but not a community. Classes or categories are not the right sorts of groups to be targets of genocide. The class of all the individuals who were in the Twin Towers on 9/11 does not define a group  that it would make any sense to regard as a target of genocide. When Marc Lépine entered a classroom in Montreal in 1989, announced that he was "fighting feminism," separated the men from the women, shot nine women, killing six, and then roamed the hallways shooting more women, 14 all told, he became a mass murderer but not a perpetrator of genocide. Feminist scholars rightly call this a femicide. But femicide is not an instance of genocide. Last month a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs posed the following question to me after I gave a version of this talk. Was Hitler's destruction of the Czech city of Lidice in response to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a genocide? Was Hitler's destruction of the city of Lidice a genocide? I thought that was an astute question. 

If the city of Carthage was a victim of genocide, why not the city of Lidice? Again, I would say the way to think about it is to consider to what extent that city defined the social vitality of its members. The city of Lidice was part of the larger Czech state that was surely also a contributor to the social vitality of the inhabitants of its cities, which makes the case more complicated than that of Carthage. There is more to be said, but I want now to leave the worry that the U.N. definition may be too narrow and turn to the worry that it may be too wide, because of the phrase "in whole or in part." On the commonest interpretation of "in whole or in part," that phrase invites the question, how big does the part have to be? For example, how many need be killed? One person is a part of a group. Yet the murder of one person is not a genocide, though it can be a hate crime. And what if there are survivors? Has a people really been killed if there are survivors? And by the way, there are almost always some survivors. How severe must the harm be? Must it be irreversible? how many need be harmed? How many children need be transferred? Must they be permanently lost to their communities of origin? How much physical destruction must there be? How much birth prevention, and so on? The U.N. definition invites these sorts of questions. One of the provisos with which the United States eventually accepted the genocide convention was that the "part" had to be "a substantial part." It seems there is no non-arbitrary way to draw a line between genocides and less massive atrocities. In contrast to the U.N. definition, Raphael Lemkin's approach, which fits well with my social death hypothesis, does not so naturally invite questions of "how many?" On his view, genocides victimize members of a group generally. Instead of interpreting "in whole or in part" as a matter of how many individuals were killed or harmed, Lemkin looks at the kinds of relationships and the kinds of social institutions that define a group as a people. 

For example, its educational institutions, it child-rearing practices, its language, its economic practices, its political practices, its religion or religions. These are what he regards as the group's essential foundations. He defines genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of these essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves" The aim of annihilating the group is attached, in Lemkin's definition, to the overall plan that aims to destroy foundations of the life of the group. The U.N. definition, in contrast, attaches the aim of destroying the group to the enumerated kinds of actions, thereby inviting the question how many such actions need be performed? How many people need be killed, in order for that action to be constitutive of a genocide? On Lemkin's view, the group is destroyed by destroying the relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, personal and institutional, that are created by these social institutions fundamental to defining its members as a people. This destruction can, and typically does, take place in stages, over time, as social restrictions and prohibitions are imposed. It's not as though religious, ethnical, and national groups are different kinds of targets of genocide. Rather, religious, ethnic, and political institutions are all part of what bind individuals together into a people, and it is the people that is the target. Like the U.N. definition, Lemkin's understanding also allows for genocide to be a matter of degree. But on Lemkin's approach, degrees are the kinds and ranges of social vitality destroyed, which tends to affect individuals in the group generally, not just a part of them, even if not all are affected in the same way or to the same degree. Here is an illustration of the difference between the U.N. 

approach and the Lemkin approach. Take the case of Rwanda. After the Rwandan genocide, President Clinton said he did not realize how many were being killed, as though that were key to defining genocide. He was thinking in terms of the U.N. definition. But on Lemkin's approach, we would look for destruction of social vitality in terms of practices, institutions, and relationships. Given what is commonly known and not known in the United States about the Rwandan genocide, it might appear, initially, to us as though Rwanda were a counter-example to my social death hypothesis. What seems most salient in the case of Rwanda is the rapid mass slaughter by machete. Where is the social death? But, in fact, the mass slaughters were preceded by a series of social restrictions and prohibitions that actually did destroy the social vitality of those perceived as Tutsis, making it much easier for Hutus to kill them. Samantha Powers writes in her historical survey which she titled A Problem from Hell, that the Hutu newspaper Kangura published in December 1990 a list of "Ten Commandments of the Hutu," governing relations between Hutu and Tutsi. They included such statements as that any Hutu who marries, befriends, or employs as a secretary or concubine a Tutsi woman shall be considered a traitor, and likewise for any Hutu who makes a business partnership with a Tutsi, invests money in a Tutsi enterprise, or lends to or borrows money from a Tutsi, and the list goes on. 

Similarly, she writes, in the town of Celinas in northern Bosnia non-Serbs were given "special status" prior to expelling them or concentrating them in camps. A curfew was imposed from 4 PM to 6 AM. Non-Serbs were prohibited from meeting in cafes, restaurants, or other public places, bathing or swimming in the nearby rivers, hunting or fishing, moving to another town without permission, carrying a weapon, driving or traveling by car, and that list goes on as well. The restrictions were less dramatic and less visible to outsiders than were the mass slaughters that followed. But what is most dramatic and most visible is not necessarily what is central to the evil of destroying a people. A similar point can be made regarding terrorism. What is dramatic and most visible is usually a spectacle, such as a bombing; but what is central to terrorism is a pattern, a systematic program of credible threats. Lemkin also understands a genocide as having two phases: the first phase consists in the destruction of a people, and the second phase consists in the imposition of a new people on the land or individuals remaining after the first phase. Destruction of a people does not always require mass slaughter. Hitler reserved that measure only for those whom he considered un-Germanizable. 

 In conclusion, let's return to the some of opening questions. Some of them have already been addressed at some length. Take that first one. How do genocides differ from non-genocidal mass murders? The idea of social death is helpful. First, the victim of genocide is a people or a substantial community, and the aim, or foreseeable consequence, is to destroy the social vitality made possible by social institutions and connections that make of its members a people or community. Mass murders can victimize aggregates of individuals, or categories or classes, who do not constitute a people or community. Second, genocide need not be massively homicidal on either the U.N. definition or Lemkin's definition. Some genocide scholars think it stretches the concept of genocide too much if mass murder is not considered essential, with the result that genocide no longer seems as serious a crime. My view is, first, that it is not obvious that social death is less serious than physical death. And second, that not all genocides are equal. 

Some are much worse than others. Much depends on how the death is brought about. Consider the mass rapes aimed at enforced pregnancy perpetrated in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. This atrocity left some female survivors little more than gestating corpses, social outcasts, unmarriageable, their offspring unassimilable. What had they to look forward to other than life-long Post Traumatic Stress? Would their fate have been worse if they had been killed? The worst harm that Immanuel Kant was able to imagine was to be treated merely as a means to the ends of others, to have one's humanity utterly disrespected, devalued, to be treated as a thing. Hannah Arendt identified an even worse harm, namely, to have one's humanity utterly destroyed. Extreme social death comes close to that idea. What about the question is genocide redundant as a crime, given other war crimes and crimes against humanity? The idea of crimes against humanity was defended as distinct from war crimes on the ground that it can be committed outside the context of war and against a country's own nationals. The idea of the crime of genocide can be defended as a special kind of crime against humanity that inflicts a harm, namely, social death, that is not captured by other crimes against humanity and that tends to be more severe and pervasive in its effects. What about the question whether genocide the worst crime or the greatest evil imaginable? If social death is central to one's understanding of genocide, how severe it is depends on the degree of the loss of social vitality, the forms those losses take, and whether any form of social vitality is recoverable. 

Forced assimilation and transportation of children can result in very great losses of social vitality. But if there remains the possibility of regeneration, and if there remain remnants of social vitality, it would probably have been worse to kill the children or to enslave them than to transport and try to assimilate them. By the way, on this understanding of genocide, we can view the kidnapping, selling, and transport of Africans to the New World to be slaves as a genocidal project. The destruction of the slaves' social vitality may not have been a by-product. Even if it was, that destruction was a reasonably foreseeable and accepted price of having slaves and so, I think, should count as part of the perpetrators' intent, broadly construed. Even if not every genocide is the worst imaginable crime, that does not preclude the judgment that the Holocaust is the worst atrocity perpetrated within recorded history. If you take as central to defining the Holocaust the projects of its perpetrators, the Holocaust was much more than a genocide. First, it was more than one genocide. Second, it included terrorism, torture, and deprivations that Primo Levi well-described as "useless violence," which were superfluous even for the aims of the genocides. And so, even if genocide is not necessarily the worst imaginable crime, that does not mean that the Holocaust wasn't. 

[applause]