Genocides Have No Winners
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 27 Mar 2017
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
20 Mar 2017 – Genocides are what students of politics call ‘path-dependent’.
Once a genocidal process is set in motion it is hard to recall.
Genocide starts with a small group of racists, with multiple motives and multiple strategic aims, out of a genocidal plan.
Then genocidal ideas and worldviews are promoted in society.
Soon these ideas begin to fill the air in society at large: the people breath them actively.
They cannot get enough of it, in due course.
Once genocidal view reaches the level of essential social Oxygen the perpetrating society has lost its ability to be awaken from the national nightmare.
Typically genocidal peoples de-humanize their target group (s).
In the process, the perpetrating people destroy their own collective humanity.
Alongside the destruction of the victim group(s), the perpetrating dominant groups (and those who chose to NOT lift their fingers even when they become aware of Evil engulfing their society at large) set in motion the process of self-destruction.
Even among those who are pained by their knowledge of their own society’s genocide learn to develop indifference or feel constrained to publicly display their empathy with Rohingya victims.
All genocides end in tears and destroy humanness in all involved in it, as perpetrators, on-lookers, whitewashers, collaborators, and victims.”
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Dr. Maung Zarni is a Burmese activist blogger, Associate Fellow at the University of Malaya, a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, London School of Economics, and a nonresident scholar with the Sleuk Rith Institute in Cambodia. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press. He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years.
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Dear Dr. Maung Zarni, Genocides have winners, as all wars, minute, small, medium, large and extra-large have. These are military manufacturers, their researchers and workers, politicians who organize – and promote – Games of War and murder, Banks, warlords, Corporate Media with lots of vested interests in the Death Industry. Religious Corporations are also among the winners, which is why they own so many shares in the Military Industry and why they are continuously ‘blessing’ arms and Armies. Security and construction companies, funeral parlours, are also big winners.
It is for the benefit of the above groups that politicians happily organize a world of violence. People dying, families and buildings destroyed are for them the inevitable side effects of their business.
Whilst we go on resarching, producing and selling killing toys (weapons, bombs, landmines, rockets, mortars, bombardiers, Apaches, warships, drones, etc, etc) nothing will change.
If weapons were a deterrent, as majority of the gullible population believe, (and politicians are happy that it is so) we would give a gun to every child at school, to guarantee Peace in the classroom.
Dear Alberto,
I don’t think we have disagreement here. We are making two different arguments on a two different levels.
Genocides have been committed centuries before the word was coined during the WWII years by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer and activist whose teenager interest was initially triggered by the Armenian genocide of 1915.
At one level, you are absolutely right that there are always material gains – land (e.g., “colonial genocides of N. America”, as evidenced in the edited volume of Alex Hinton et al, Duke U. Press, 2013), the Holocaust (which involved multiple strategic end goals, and certainly LAND), and the gains accruing to the military and armament industry (the military-industrial complex) – as Eisenhower put it in his 1961 Farewell speech as US President, etc.
My argument is based on a deep-humanist stance – and a very simple logic and reality: those who dehumanize – and destroy – others do so at the expense of their own humanity.
From my humanist perspective – and I am sure there are other positions – it is a simple logic: each time you dehumanize and destroy others you destroy your humanity.
Ultimately, genocidaires and their victims are differently destroyed.
White-Privilege-White-Guilt stems from this phenomenon: if you are conscious of your crime you can feel fully humans or maintain a sense of your human worth or respect.
So, the gains you may reap from the successful genocidal acts are not worth the destruction you trigger inside yourself.
This is not a New Age discourse: I suppose by the time one is committed to commissioning and participating in genocidal acts one has already lost one’s humanity.
There is not enough $$, Power, Land, etc. for a fully awake human person to partake in the intentional destruction of a community of fellow humans.
In that sense, genocides are lose-lose, if unstoppable and recurring human deeds/phenomena.
Thank you for taking the time to offer a materialist perspective. We do not have a disagreement here.
Regards,
zarni
Correcting a typo: should read “White-Privilege-White-Guilt stems from this phenomenon: if you are conscious of your crime you can NOT feel fully humans or maintain a sense of your human worth or respect.”
Dear Zarni,
You say “if you are conscious of your crime you can NOT feel fully humans or maintain a sense of your human worth or respect.”, seemingly ignoring the fact 99,99% of soldiers kill because they’ve been ordered to kill and if they don’t kill, they get killed themselves.
Prisons the world over are full of murderers; some – a minority – happy to have destroyed the life of someone they had a problem with, but majority regretting what they’ve done. Similarly, there are soldiers who suffer nightmares and a great variety of psychological problems, not only for what they’ve done but also for what they’ve witnessed.
However, society accepts – this is the degenerate education offered by our Ministries of Education – that, if you kill one person, you are a murderer but, if you are in military attire and kill 1000 people you are a hero. The more you kill the better to become famous, have your portrait and bust in many puclic buildings or squares and if Politics interests you, the more you kill, the greater your chances of a successful poplitical career. To exemplify my point, I’ll just mention a offical murderers who made brilliant political careers: Napoleon, Cromwell, Wellington, Churchill, Eisenhower, de Gaulle, Netanyahu, etc, etc, the list is very long.
Personally, I’m terrorized by weapons, that is, to me, whether you kill out of your own volition or as part of an army, obeying orders, you are a terrorist. To me, killing on behalf of our Governments, one hundred or one million, it is ALL Genocide.
I don’t blame money. I have nothing against people wishing to make money. If a politicians has a friend who manufactures cars, gets his friend a lucrative contract and the friend thanks the politician with a handsome commission, I’m happy for him. However, I utterly refuse to accept that millions shoud die every year, because our politicians want to make a bit of extra money.
Not only we create armed Genocides (if you count the dead from the over 200 armed conflicts we have at any given moment, worldwide, you’ll see that we have a permanent international Genocide), but we also create millions of dead – including many children – from hunger or lack of medical care, all due to our “forcing” poor countries to spend their limited resources in Military ware and military action.
We could have the same weapons but in the “toy” version, like the game Paint Ball, we could still count at the end of each day the winners and losers, though in reality, we’ll all be winners. This will be bad news only for funeral companies, the flower industry and cemeteries.
Alternatively, if Governments want to play War, members of Government should volunteer and play the Game. We could put the two fighting Governments in a football pitch and watch them kill each other. Why should millions of young people kill or get killed, millions of parents loose the children they brought up with much love and often, sacrifice, or millions of children become orphans, just because Governments say so?
Unless we demilitarize the world, nothing will change.
Alberto
President HUFUD (Humanity United for Universal Demilitarization)
I AGREE THAT genocides have no winners.
One aspect is that ethnic groups often appear on the victim and perpetrator side of ethnic violence.
For instance:
– Turks driven from the Balkans in the two Balkan Wars preceding WW I reappear as the Young Turks orchestrating the Armenian genocide.
– Cercessians who are driven from the Caucasus by the Tsarist empire reappear as perpetrators in the Armenian genocide as well (final killings in the Syrian desert).
– Kurds occupy regions from which Armenians are expelled. There they become victims of Turkish Kemalist, then AKP nationalism.
Genocides often are not isolated events but part of empire building / empire dissolution. Frames using only two groups, a limited timespan and a fixed good/bad attribution are highly problematic.
Yours
Werner T. Meyer
Werner T Meyer, your las paragraph “Genocides often are not isolated events but part of empire building / empire dissolution”, is EXACTLY what I’m saying. This in fact, is proof that I an right. There are winners. Most of the people who kill or die in conflict don’t know why they’re doing it, for they are only obeying orders. The elite that controls them are the ones intent on building or destroying an Empire.
If they succeed in their aims, isn’t that a success???? millions of soldiers/slaves had to die, to help the British Monarchy help build the British Empire. Soldiers killing or being killed has nothing to do with winning or losing. Soldiers killing and dying are only the ingredient needed for those playing Games of Power.