Let us begin think­ing through geno­cide with a legal def­i­n­i­tion, think­ing about inter­na­tional law and its prob­lems, and the inad­e­quacy of our courts to really deal with vio­lence on this scale. The largest flaw that is imme­di­ately appar­ent to me is the lack of cul­tural or struc­tural think­ing about geno­cide. Sec­ondly, there is a tele­o­log­i­cal approach to geno­cide. Geno­cide is a crime, a dis­crete act rather than a process rip­pling out­ward vir­tu­ally for­ever. Third, given both of these, how should we then think about legal respon­si­bil­ity and genocide?

Fur­ther ques­tions: How does one legally think about con­tin­ual cul­tural geno­cide: the sys­tem­atic era­sure of a cul­ture? How does one locate geno­cide within broader social struc­tures? How has geno­cide been pro­duc­tive for the State and for states? How can we think about geno­cide transna­tion­ally or as a mech­a­nism for pro­duc­ing and rein­forc­ing nation state’s borders?

Within the def­i­n­i­tion, we see west­ern norms play­ing out, slot­ted over the top of a global scale: indi­vid­ual respon­si­bil­ity for over messy col­lec­tive, struc­tural respon­si­bil­ity or account­abil­ity. Part of this may be purely strate­gic: how do you hold an entire cul­ture or coun­try respon­si­ble for geno­cide? Every­thing is so much messier and com­pli­cated than that.

I think of Han­nah Arendt and her book on Eich­mann stand­ing trial in Jerusalem. Arendt sees Eich­mann, a Nazi bureau­crat respon­si­ble for much logis­ti­cal details of the Holo­caust, as ter­ri­fy­ingly nor­mal, evi­dence of “the banal­ity of evil”: the nor­mal­iza­tion and bureau­cra­ti­za­tion of geno­cide dur­ing the Holo­caust. To think of evil as banal high­lights on the dif­fi­culty our cul­tural sys­tems have in deal­ing with geno­cide or trauma on such a col­lec­tive level like that. To be banal is to be invis­i­ble on a cer­tain level, part of the every­day fab­ric of life. In this light, one could argue for the banal­ity of geno­cide within Amer­i­can cul­ture: a cul­ture of geno­cide engag­ing in cul­tural genocide.

At the same time, to fore­ground col­lec­tive respon­si­bil­ity is per­haps to let cer­tain indi­vid­u­als off the hook with regard to their role in geno­cide. Eich­mann, while per­haps not a mon­ster per se, SHOULD be held account­able for his actions that resulted in the sys­tem­atic mur­der of a peo­ple. The individual’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in geno­cide is a ques­tion of moral­ity and agency, per­haps the best tools to which west­ern cul­ture has access to address the indi­vid­ual and indi­vid­ual action.

Another thing I have been think­ing about regard­ing geno­cide is the HIV/AIDS cri­sis (specif­i­cally within North Amer­ica; I’m sure much of what I am think­ing is applic­a­ble to Africa but I don’t know enough to say any­thing for sure) and the Amer­i­can government’s response to it: too lit­tle, too late, under­funded and dis­crim­i­na­tory. ACT UP, the rad­i­cal direct action AIDS activist orga­ni­za­tion engaged in a lot of work deploy­ing the term geno­cide to describe the cri­sis as a ral­ly­ing cry to trans­form the gay and les­bian community’s response to it: from anx­i­ety to rage. This is inter­est­ing to think about on a few dif­fer­ent lev­els. If we accept ACT UP’s premise, AIDS was geno­cide through nega­tion. The state was (pre­sum­ably) not respon­si­ble for unleash­ing the dis­ease itself but NIH’s delayed, under­funded, and inad­e­quate response demon­strates the value of the lives of gays, les­bians, peo­ple of color, and intra­venous drug users to the state: effec­tively nil.

Look­ing at the legal def­i­n­i­tion, this might be placed under Arti­cle II, sec­tion c: “Geno­cide by delib­er­ately inflict­ing con­di­tions of life cal­cu­lated to bring about phys­i­cal destruc­tion”. How­ever, it is easy to imag­ine “delib­er­ately” being the legal stick­ing point for argu­ments about this. How do we locate intent within this? Indi­vid­u­als? This feels odd. The entire het­ero­sex­ist hege­mony is at fault here but unfor­tu­nately it is so banal that we dif­fi­culty see­ing it, let alone its com­pli­ca­tion of con­scious intent.