President Joe Biden has declared the displacement and mass murder of Armenians in 1915 at the hands of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Chinese government’s treatment of the Muslim Uyghurs, as genocides.
It appears the motivation is intended to score political points against both regimes. But in so doing, is the Biden Administration guilty of contributing to the trivialization of the term ‘genocide’ and simultaneously hypocritically ignoring our own history of annihilation of tens of millions of Native Americans, who once populated the entire North American continent. Not to mention ignoring the 400 year long enslavement of millions of African men, women and children, untold numbers of whom died in the middle passage, at the hands of slave traders who profited from human suffering; or the systemic racism instituted in American society thereafter, that served to disenfranchise and marginalize African-American citizens, the stigma of which persists to this day?
Because if we are to accuse the Turks and the Chinese governments of genocide, then, at the very least, we too must publicly acknowledge our guilt in the commission of genocide, not once but twice.
This issue begs the question, does genocide differ from its associated term, ‘crimes against humanity’ that have been used interchangeably for decades.
The term genocide was first introduced in 1945 at the Nuremberg Trials, following the mass murder of 6 million+ Jews and other marginalized groups such as Gypsies and homosexuals. This event occurred under a unique set of historical and political circumstances. As such, in my opinion, the term was intended to refer to group murder under a special set of requirements under international law, if such a thing even exists.
What may be those special set of requirements?
The Jewish Holocaust was the first time in history that a nation state targeted a specific group of people for extermination, then proceeded to create the nation-wide infrastructure to identify, carefully define the characteristics of the targeted individuals, incite the masses to hate so as to justify and legitimize the act, round up the victims in camps with help from average citizens and local organizations, commit the inhumane forced separation of families, and then the implementation of the evil act itself, mass murder on an industrial scale.
These acts were not committed in response to or in the midst of war or civil strife. The planning was carried out in peacetime and required years of in-depth planning and preparation and the widespread dissemination of propaganda by the State, as well as the complicity of thousands in its nation-wide implementation, which included a significant proportion of the population that understood what was transpiring but who remained silent nonetheless, in a nation that considered itself both civilized, enlightened, scientifically advanced and Christian. This act was covered up by instigating a war, rather than prompted by it.
Therefore, I think it is time to place both terms into their proper perspective.
There is no doubt that the Turkish Ottoman Empire was responsible for the murders of 800,000 to 1.2 Million Armenians in 1915. But was it a genocide or a crime against humanity? Both terms address the murder of groups of people. But, in my opinion, it was not a genocide. It was a crime against humanity. The same rationale would apply to the annihilation and canceling of Native Americans and their culture.
However, the pre-meditated enslavement, torture and murder of Africans, its universality among European Christian nations, its planning and preparation in peacetime, and the cruel intentional separation of families and sale of human beings for profit does meet, in my opinion, the requirements of genocide, as defined above, and should be included in retrospect under the category of genocide.
In conclusion, I believe a clear distinction must be made between genocide and crimes against humanity, on the basis of the characteristic of the group being targeted, the circumstances that led to it, the complicity of thousands of people, its peacetime evolution, the heinous act of forced separation of families, as well as the manner in which the mass murders were implemented. Otherwise, we are all guilty of trivializing what the Nazis invented during the period 1933-1945, as well as the genocidal European project to enslave African and Indigenous peoples in the 16-19th centuries. And by trivializing true genocide we will only make it more likely it could happen again.
