KINDS OF KILLING
How bad is genocide, really?
text by NICK LAND
Since 1948, defending genocide has been the surest way to ruin a dinner party. That
doesn’t mean, however, that the topic deserves to be immunised from controversy.
There is one question in particular that merits intense and prolonged scrutiny: Is
genocide really worse than killing a lot of people?
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L
ike ‘fascism’ – with which it is closely
connected in the popular imagination
– ‘genocide’ is a word carrying such
exorbitant emotional charge that it tends to
blow the fuses of any attempt at dispassionate
analysis. We can thank the political black magic
of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi accomplices for
that.
Prior to the Third Reich and its systematic,
industrialised attempts to eradicate entire
ethno-racial populations (Jews, Roma, and
perhaps Slavs) along with other numerous
other groups (mental and physical ‘defectives’
or ‘useless eaters’, homosexuals, communists,
Jehovah’s Witnesses …) international law
restricted its attention to the actions and
grievances of states and individuals, with
the latter subdivided into combatants and
noncombatants. The National Socialist trauma
changed that fundamentally.
On December 9, 1948, the United
Nations adopted the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide (as Resolution 260), defining a new
category of internationally recognised crimes
as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or
religious group.”
Since 1948, defending genocide has
been the surest way to ruin a dinner party.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the topic
deserves to be immunised from controversy.
There is one question in particular that merits
intense and prolonged scrutiny: Is genocide
really worse than killing a lot of people? Posed
slightly more technically: Is there a crime of
genocide that stands above and beyond mass
murder (of equivalent scale)? Can groups be
the specific victims of crime? This is to ask
whether groups exist – and have value – as
anything more than a nominal or strictly
formal set, whose reality is exhausted by its
constituent individual members. The existence
of genocide as a legal category presumes a
(positive) answer to this question, and in doing
so it closes down a problem of great and very
general importance.
The classical liberal presumption is
quite different, as summarised (a little bluntly)
by the provocative remark made by British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1987:
“there is no such thing as society. There are
individual men and women, and there are
families”. Harshly extrapolating from this
position, a certain irony might be found in
the fact that a horrified response to National
Socialist crimes has taken the form of a legal
codification of racial collectivism. At the very
least, it is puzzling that suspicions directed
at legal references to ‘group rights’ and ‘hate
crimes’ among those of a libertarian bent
has not been extended to the category of
genocide.
In the opposite camp, the most
fully articulated defence of collectives as real
entities is found, as might be expected, in
the foundation of sociology as an academic
discipline, and more particularly in Émile
Durkheim’s argument for ‘social facts’. Larry
May’s 2010 Genocide: A Normative Account
looks back further, to Thomas Hobbes’
Leviathan, or social being, in which human
individuals are absorbed as organic parts.
Whilst the distinction of ‘society’
and ‘individual’ has colloquial (and political)
meaning, those inclined to the analysis of
complex systems are more likely to ask
which groups or societies are real individuals,
exhibiting functional or behavioural integrity,
as self-reproducing wholes. In pursuing this
line of investigation, it is far more relevant to
discriminate between types of groups than
between groups and individuals, or even
wholes and parts. It is especially helpful to
distinguish feature groups from unit groups.
A feature group is determined by
logical classification.This might be expressed as
a self-identification or sense of ‘belonging’, an
external political or academic categorisation, or
some combination of these, but the essentials
remain the same in each case. Certain features
of the individual are isolated and emphasised
(such as genitalia, sexual orientation, skincolour, income, or religious belief), and then
employed as the leading clue in a process of
formal grouping, which conforms theoretically
to the mathematics of sets.
A unit group, in contrast, is defined
as an assemblage, or functional whole. Its
members belong to the group insofar as they
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work together, even if they are entirely devoid
of common identity features. Membership
is decided by role, rather than traits, since
one becomes part of such a group through
functional involvement, rather than classification
of characteristics. Social instances of such
groups include primitive tribes (determined
by functional unities rather than the categories
of modern ‘identity politics’), cities, states, and
companies. The most obvious instance in
socialist theory is the ‘soviet’ or ‘danwei’ work
unit (whilst social classes are feature groups).
To take a non-anthropomorphic
example, consider a skin cell. Its feature group
is that of skin cells in general, as distinguished
from nerve cells, liver cells, muscle cells, or
others. Any two skin cells share the same
feature group, even if they belong to different
organisms, or even species, exist on different
continents, and never functionally interact.
The natural unit group of the same skin cell,
in contrast, would be the organism it belongs
to. It shares this unit group with all the other
cells involved in the reproduction of that
organism through time, including those (such
as intestinal bacteria) of quite separate genetic
lineages. Considered as a unit group member,
a skin cell has greater integral connection
with the non-biological tools and other
‘environmental’ elements involved in the life of
the organism than it does with other skin cells
– even perfect clones – with which it is not
functionally entangled.
Clearly, both feature groups and unit
groups are ‘fuzzy sets’, and the distinction itself
– whilst theoretically precise – is empirically
hazy. An urban American street gang, for
instance, will in most cases be vague in its
features and unity, perhaps ‘ethnic’ to some
degree of definition, with a determinable
age-range, and with ambiguous functional
connections to groupings on a larger scale,
or to peripheral members whose status of
‘belonging’ is not strictly decidable. Tattoos
and other membership markings are likely to
involve both identity and integrity aspects –
traits and roles. Rituals of belonging (ordeals,
oaths, rites of passage) are designed to
disambiguate membership.
Despite such haziness, the distinction
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“When a unit group is destroyed, a real
individual is ‘killed’ above and beyond
whatever human losses are incurred. The
destruction of a feature group, in contrast,
whatever the cultural loss, is not any kind
of killing beyond the mass murder of
human individuals.”
between these two types of groups strikes
directly at the core problematic of genocide
(as a legal category). When a unit group is
destroyed, a real individual is ‘killed’ above and
beyond whatever human losses are incurred.
The destruction of a feature group, in contrast,
whatever the cultural loss, is not any kind of
killing beyond the mass murder of human
individuals. If this is worse than murder, we
should know why.
This conclusion seems relevant when
weighing, for instance, the 1937 Massacre of
Nanjing on the scale of historical atrocity. It
suggests, at least, that an act of violence directed
against a city – or integrated population unit
– is no less worthy of specific legal attention
than a quantitatively equivalent offence against
an ethnicity, or determined population type.
It seems to be no more than an accident
of history that, in order to appropriate the
category of genocide, massive crimes of the
former variety need to be recoded as if they
more properly belonged to the latter.
Complex systems ontology aside,
these matters resolve ultimately into obscure
social values. Orthodox conceptions of
‘genocide’ assume that ethnic identity simply
and unquestionably means more than active
citizenship, or participation in the life of a city.
Perhaps this assumption is even arguable. But
has it been argued?
Nick Land is a writer and theorist currently
based in Shanghai. His scattered writings have
been recently collated as Fanged Noumena
(Urbanomic, 2011), whilst recent antitheoretical
forays can be found on his excellent Urban
Future blog, www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/
category/article/id/4.
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