Abstract
What is genocide? The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, appeared for the first time in legal discourse in the indictment of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg in November 1945, and was formally defined by the United Nations in 1948. Lemkin seems to have been influenced by his early involvement in discussions concerning the possible prosecution of those responsible for the Armenian massacres that began in 1915. The legal use and definition of the term, however, was prompted by the Holocaust. In her thought-provoking study Rebecca Jinks now suggests that the Holocaust has fundamentally shaped the way the West has understood, narrated and interpreted all subsequent genocides. As a result, she argues, we have more often than not failed to understand these incidents fully and have become blind to the role the West has often played in their genesis.
Jinks focuses on four twentieth-century case studies: Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. These are not studied separately but rather serve as constant points of reference in an argument which examines literary, film and photographic evidence and the processes of memorialization. Throughout, Jinks distinguishes between mainstream Holocaust representations and those which are more critical and engaged. Each type is replicated in approaches to subsequent genocides. The former, she suggests, present the Holocaust as a uniquely inhumane event in ways that distance it from our own experience and make it difficult for us to comprehend what actually happens in a genocidal event. The latter, by contrast, emphasize the ordinariness of the circumstances that give rise to such genocidal events, tending to emphasize the particularity of different genocides, generally without reference to the Holocaust as ‘the paradigm genocide’ (p. 22).
According to Jinks, the typical or mainstream Holocaust narrative is one which depicts genocide as an aberrant event perpetrated by evil agents against innocent human beings. The typical Holocaust and genocide narrative is one which demonizes the perpetrator or perpetrators and excoriates or expresses disgust for their politics. One feature of the response to post-Holocaust genocides is the status and authority given to foreign witnesses of genocidal events, whose commentaries are rarely profound and whose interventions sometimes even have a negative impact on the unfolding events that they record.
The Holocaust also provides the model for our ideas about resolving genocides. What Jinks terms the ‘judicial romanticism’ (p. 23) of Nuremberg has generated a preoccupation with dealing with genocidal leaderships rather than with confronting the ongoing structures of violence that often persist in the wake of a genocidal event. Historians of Germany might be tempted to object somewhat at this point. for the story of resolving the Holocaust did not end at Nuremberg but has arguably preoccupied German society to this day. The German case surely illustrates just how complex the process of resolution can be in practice. At the same time it also provides an instance where the aftermath of genocide did not involve ongoing violence. The history of Germans ‘working through’ the Holocaust would have been worth some consideration here, if only to show how differently Jinks’s four prime examples played out.
Finally, our response to genocide, Jinks believes, is more often than not platitudinous and predictable. Yet intoning the habitual ‘never again’ often stands in the way of the critical engagement that might ensure that genocide really does not happen again.
Jinks engages with a plethora of theoretical discourses and has brought together a vast amount of disparate material that will be of great interest to anyone working in Holocaust or genocide studies. Her central theme – that the Holocaust has provided the model for the representation of subsequent genocides – is extremely stimulating and is sure to be tested against other cases. Her book will undoubtedly serve as the starting point for future study of this important subject.