© Darius A. Irani, 2020
In August 1959 a lonely, penniless and almost homeless Polish Jew died at a bus stop on 42nd Street in New York. Had he been just another desperate refugee from Hitler’s Germany his death would not be noteworthy. But he wasn’t. He was a renowned jurist and an authority on crimes against humanity. His lasting legacy to us was to add a new word to our vocabulary. In 1943 he coined the term “genocide” to describe both Hitler’s crimes against the people of Europe and the earlier annihilation of the Armenians by the Turks. Having read Mein Kampf, and understanding the savage determination in Hitler’s desire to eradicate the Jews of Europe, he tried desperately to warn his family to flee, with little success. Both his parents and 47 other members of his immediate family would be rounded up and gassed in Treblinka in 1943. Raphael Lemkin barely escaped to New York where he spent the rest of his life trying to bring men like Hitler to justice. He should have been neither penniless nor homeless, but his obsession with Genocide was so all-consuming that he neglected his finances and his health, resulting in his untimely death at the age of 59.
A google search of the word genocide yields at least twenty definitions, including two by Lemkin himself. Some scholars have coined additional terms like “democide” and “politicide” to cover the whole spectrum of killing without the excuse of a war. Arguably, UN General Assembly Resolution 96 (of December 1946) provides the simplest and most comprehensive definition: “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings“
How do genocides happen? What is the process by which an entity/state proceeds from intent to extermination? Sadly, the 20th century provides us with ample examples, all of them eerily similar:
Step 1: Take absolute power over the country. Rummel (univ. of Hawaii) rightly suggests that genocides rarely happen in democracies. It is the totalitarian psychopaths who do most of the killing.
Step 2: Gag the media. Nobody, not even your own people must know what is really happening. Where there is true freedom of the press, the whole world can see, condemn and remember. Where there is no freedom, few will ever know and still fewer remember.
Step 3: Disarm the intended victims. Heck, disarm the whole country, one never knows who will need to be killed next.
Step 4: Use the media to dehumanize the victims. If one is going to kill tens of thousands of humans it is easier if you think of them as vermin.
Step 5: Assemble like-minded psychopaths who have drunk deeply of the propaganda kool-aid and turn them loose.
Starting with the Ottoman Empire (the first large-scale genocide of the 20th century) through Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Pakistan in Bangladesh, etc., This pattern repeats itself. Step 3 is often unnecessary as most modern societies have already been disarmed. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Idi Amin had no need for Step 4 - they possessed no humanity that needed to be placated. Not to suggest that Hitler did, but he did mount a concerted campaign to vilify the Jews and justify his final solution.
The table below presents the best estimates of the number of victims of the various genocides in the 20th century. It can be hard to read, and the version here is incomplete. However by clicking on the “Download the full PDF” icon, a much more readable version is available. The red lines are the count of Hitler’s (and earlier German) victims; The yellow Stalin’s; and the green Mao’s (and earlier Chinese). All the others events are captured in the blue lines.
Trying to get the numbers right is a challenge. Consider just one event-Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1962).
- After Mao’s death official Chinese sources put the number of victims at 16.5 million.
- Wikipedia authors suggest a low of 18 million and a high of 30 million. They also point to 30 million births lost or postponed. Say 39 million in total.
- A Chinese journalist (Yang Jisheng) indicates 36 million dead from starvation and another 20 million failed to be born, giving a total of 56 million.
- Frank Dikotter (a visiting professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong) obtained documentation pointing to 45 million.
- The Encyclopedia Britannica puts the count at about 20 million.
- And finally, reputable demographer Judith Banister puts the count at 30 million
Averaging out to about 34M for this single event.
The numbers suggest that Stalin killed nearly three times as many as Hitler, and Mao at least twice as many. Yet, whenever we talk of genocide the first-and only-villain that comes to mind is Hitler. The reason for this is simple: as the Allies moved eastward through Germany they liberated the German labor and death camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen. Army and civilian photographers took hundreds of pictures and videos and these images were seared into our minds. Conversely, Stalin and Mao’s genocides happened on the other side of a black hole from which barely a handful of photons of light escaped to show us what was going on in those two countries. A Google search for images of the Gulags yields almost nothing. One collection, described as being “haunting,” contains only a single picture of a mass grave site; the others show what look like adequately dressed and reasonably fed men toiling at some civil construction projects. It is this complete control over the media that is an essential element of the genocide cycle, and allows the Stalins and Maos of our time to literally get away with murder. Beware the demagogues who work hard at discrediting the free press. They are assuredly hiding something. Let them get away with it, and the next body to go missing could be yours.
Note 1 - Some of the most haunting images from Hitler’s camps are documented in a film titled Night Will Fall. It is available on Amazon Prime. It is extremely difficult to watch.
Note 2 - The movie First They Killed My Father perfectly captures the above five steps as they actually unfolded in Cambodia.
Note 3 - The documentary Intent to Destroy chronicles the making of the movie The Promise which is set during the Armenian Genocide. It too is a good example of these five steps in action, and the great lengths gone to by Turkey (to this day) to deny what happened to the Armenians.