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Abstract
Our conception of history remains largely tethered both to the notion of Europe as the epicentre of history and to categories of knowledge that may not be particularly productive of meaning in the present and near future. Eric Hobsbawm's short twentieth century is bookended by 1914, the year the Great War commenced, and 1991, which witnessed the break-up of the Soviet Union. Nationalists in countries such as India imagined Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 as the beginning of a new dawn, and similarly the gruesome genocide in Rwanda in 1994, which occurred despite the hoarse shouts of ‘Never Again’ that emanated in the wake of the Holocaust, stands forth as testimony to the brutal violence that above all characterized the twentieth century. We might say that the twentieth century has been interminably long, originating in some respects in General Sherman's still unrepudiated doctrine of total terror, and is still with us. Lal suggests that our understanding of genocide remains similarly hobbled by the definitions offered in the International Convention on Genocide and other legal instruments, and that even less restrictive applications of legal conventions are likely to be inadequate if we are to anticipate future genocides. Hindutva, or extreme Hindu nationalism, to take one example, targets not only Muslims but even, more spectacularly so, ‘soft’ Hindus. It has genocidal impulses towards the practitioners of a religion that it purports to defend, viewing Hinduism as a chaotic, polycentric and indefensible faith. What will the concentration camps of the future look like? Lal moves to a detailed consideration of the statist and evolutionist doctrine of development, and concludes with some thoughts on the invisible holocausts committed, or likely to be committed, in the name of development, the ‘international community’ and other supposed verities of the human condition.
Notes
London: Michael Joseph 1994.
I am grateful to A. Dirk Moses, Dan Stone and two other readers for their careful reading of an earlier draft and incisive observations and queries.
Vinay Lal is Associate Professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His recent books include Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (2002), The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (2003), Of Cricket, Guinness, and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (2003), Introducing Hinduism (2005), and (co-edited with Ashis Nandy) The Future of Knowledge and Culture: A Dictionary for the Twenty-first Century (2005).
It is true, of course, that many countries not involved in the conflict were, in one manner or another, dragged into the war. Over a million Indian men were dispatched overseas by the British government of India to fight a war which by no stretch of the imagination could be described as their war. Their needless sacrifice, not even of the some 50,000 men who laid down their lives in the battlefields of Mesopotamia and Flanders, has barely been noticed in Britain. The war's consequences for India were far-reaching: as prices of essential commodities shot up, standards of living declined precipitously. Defence expenditures increased by 300 per cent, and the usual shenanigans, once again so amply on display in George Bush's war on Iraq, about the imperative to preserve the world for freedom could be heard while people starved. See Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947 (Delhi: Macmillan India 1983), 168–72; Indian National Congress, Punjab Subcommittee, Report of the Commissioners [appointed to look into the Jallianawala Bagh massacre], vol. 1: Report (Bombay: Karnataka Press 1920). But my larger argument here is that Europe unthinkingly remains the template for the history we do, even if it is the history of some other place such as India, and that this hubris of knowledge creates its own forms of oppression.
J. Nehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru [1941] (Boston: Beacon Press 1958), 29–30.
S. C. Bose, ‘Japan's role in the Far East’, in Through Congress Eyes (Allahabad: Kitabistan 1938), 212.
Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux 1998).
Ibid., 149–57.
See David Newbury, ‘Irredentist Rwanda: ethnic and territorial frontiers in Central Africa’, Africa Today, vol. 44, no. 2, 1997, 211–22; Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2001), 41–75.
Some readers might insist on consistency and ask why I should deplore the failure of the West to intervene in Rwanda while critiquing the interventions that did take place in Iraq and Serbia. This quest for consistency, whatever its assumed virtues, can become another mode of evading the politics of knowledge behind all such phenomena. It is more important to probe why the West does intervene on some occasions and not on others, the relationship of such interventions to geopolitical ambitions, the particular nature of the intervention and the location of political action within the matrix of ethical thinking. For some reflections on these questions, see Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins/Perennial 2003).
With respect to Kosovo, it is now clear that stories of the mass disappearance of Albanian men, and of mass graves, were grossly exaggerated, perhaps planted by NATO and the American administration. Moreover, the Kosovar Liberation Army, hailed in the West as the supreme liberator of Albanians from the monstrous grip of Serbia, carried out as many killings as did the Serbian armed forces and their supporters.
There are important distinctions that come to mind that I cannot develop here, from the idea of war itself as a highly gendered activity and the cruel caricature of men who refuse to fight as ‘effeminate’ to the disproportionate impact that wars generally have on women and children, the sexual license that wars are seen to confer on men, the deployment of rape as a weapon of war, and ‘genocidal rape’ or ‘rape warfare’. On the policy of what American feminist law professor Catherine MacKinnon has termed ‘procreation by rape’, see Vesna Kesic, ‘Muslim women, Croatian women, Serbian women, Albanian women … ’, in Dušan I. Bjelic and Obrad Savic (eds), Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2002), 313. The treatment of women under the Taliban illustrates some of the difficulties attendant on prevailing conceptions of genocide as well as femicide. Doubtless, there were women who were subjected to sexual abuse, but I am not aware that the Taliban, notwithstanding the disputes between Pathans, Tajiks and Hazara, subjected women of other ethnic and linguistic groups to rape and sexual abuse as a matter of policy. (Indeed, in the early months of the ascendancy of the Taliban, they were vigorously defended by many people as restoring order to a country that had descended into complete chaos, and women were described as feeling safe for the first time in years.) But the denial of medical facilities, education and social services to women was so prevalent as to go well beyond what is ordinarily captured by the phrase ‘gender discrimination’. Are there circumstances under which the deliberate isolation of a specific group of people, who are allowed to regress to an earlier stage of development—and by development I denote not what is encompassed by the modern and statist ideology of development, but rather by the growth of human consciousness, moral sensibilities and civic institutions—can be construed as genocidal in intent? For valuable discussions, see Nancy Hatch Dupree, ‘Afghan women under the Taliban’, in William Maley (ed.), Afghanistan and the Taliban: The Rebirth of Fundamentalism?, rev. edn (New Delhi: Penguin 2001), 145–66; and Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords, rev. edn (London: Pan Books 2001), 105–16.
I refer only to the chemical attack on Halabja under Ali Hassan al-Majid (also known as ‘Ali Anfal’ or ‘Ali Chemical’) on 16 March 1988, which caused between 4,000 and 7,000 fatalities. This received far more coverage than the entire Anfal campaign against Kurds in Northern Iraq over a seven-month period in 1988, which is estimated to have led to the loss of as many as 100,000 Kurdish lives. See Middle East Watch, Genocide in Iraq: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds (New York: Human Rights Watch 1993), available online at www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal (viewed 10 March 2005).
Ashis Nandy, ‘The twentieth century: the ambivalent homecoming of homo psychologicus’, Hitotshubashi Journal of Social Studies, vol. 33, no. 1, July 2001, 22.
Wendell Berry, ‘Thoughts in the presence of fear’, in In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World (Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society 2001).
John Walters, Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1973).
Berry, ‘Thoughts in the presence of fear’, 6.
Quoted in V. G. Kiernan, Colonial Empires and Armies 1815–1960 (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing 1998), 123.
Winston Churchill, quoted in Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press 1981), 118–19.
Quoted in Headrick, Tools of Empire, 118. See also John Ellis, A Social History of the Machine Gun (New York: Pantheon 1975).
See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil [1963] (New York: Penguin 1977).
Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (New York: Random House 1979), 522.
There is, in principle, an important distinction to be drawn between camps intended to hold or sequester civilians, such as the internment camps for Japanese-Americans created by Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order, and the extermination camps established by the Nazis. One effect of such distinctions has been to reinforce arguments that plead for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, just as this form of reasoning unduly focuses on intent. The hardening of boundaries does not allow for the easy accommodation of numerous cases in which the lines between internment or segregation and extermination were blurred. Kitchener's contemporary (and forerunner, one might say), General Valeriano Weyler (1838–1930), the governor of Cuba, initiated the policy of reconcentration (reconcentrado) in 1897 in his attempt to inflict defeat on Cuban insurgents. Weyler, who admitted to great admiration for Sherman, hit upon a plan to separate peasant men, women and children from guerrillas by placing them in camps. Those who were not in camps were dubbed rebels and seditionists, and were liable to be shot on the spot; but those inside the camps did not fare much better, and as many as 400,000 succumbed to disease, medical negligence, malnutrition and mistreatment. See G. J. A. O'Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic 1898 (New York: Norton 1986), 56–8. The tactic of herding rural populations into camps in an effort to deprive insurgents of food and shelter was used during the Malay insurgency, and resurfaced in the form of the Strategic Hamlet programme initiated by the Americans in Vietnam in 1962. See Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin 1984), 255–8. The term ‘concentration camps’, as used by Hannah Arendt (see below) and myself, encompasses a broad semiotic register.
Pakenham, The Boer War, 522–4.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. edn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1973), 440. Arendt's mention of India is unaccompanied by any reference, but she is almost certainly referring to the practice, adopted by the British in the late nineteenth century, of keeping people who were considered to belong to ‘criminal castes’ and ‘criminal tribes’ under ‘protective custody’. British officials construed members of these allegedly criminal castes and tribes, running into the millions rather than the tens of thousands, as ‘criminals by birth’, as firm a recipe for genocide as one can imagine. The severe disabilities imposed upon these criminal castes and tribes for well over a century point to deliberate and systematic attempts to reduce their numbers. Members of criminal castes and tribes are among those unfortunate victims of genocide who have not been recognized as such; invisibility takes on new meanings with reference to them. Most histories of India do not even spare a word for them, but the work of Sanjay Nigam has been exemplary in drawing attention to them; see his ‘Disciplining and policing the “criminals by birth”’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 27, no. 2, April–June 1990, and no. 3, July–September 1990. The Criminal Tribes Act was first passed in 1871, amended in 1882, and extended by turn to various parts of India, including the Madras presidency in 1911. The government of India has made half-hearted attempts to ‘denotify’ these castes and tribes, but their living conditions remain wretched and stigma continues to be attached to them.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 437–8.
Ibid., 439.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. from the German by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso 1978), 55.
For a more extended discussion, see Vinay Lal, ‘Terrorism, Inc.: the family of fundamentalisms’, The Little Magazine (New Delhi), vol. 2, no. 5, September–October 2001, 33–43.
For an elaboration of this point, see Vinay Lal, ‘North American Hindus, the sense of history, and the politics of Internet diasporism’, in Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (eds), AsianAmerica.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace (London: Routledge 2003), 98–138. The anxiety that informs Hindutva is analysed in Vinay Lal, ‘India in the world: Hinduism, the diaspora and the anxiety of influence’, Australian Religion Studies Review, vol. 16, no. 2, Spring 2003, 19–37.
Vinay Lal, Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (London: Pluto 2002).
Siddharth Varadarajan (ed.), Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (New Delhi: Penguin 2002) is a good compendium, and the role of the state is also heavily documented in Human Rights Watch, ‘We Have No Orders to Save You’: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat, Human Rights Watch Report, vol. 14, no. 3 (New York: Human Rights Watch 2002).
See, for example, Genocide: Gujarat 2002, a special issue of Communalism Combat (Mumbai), vol. 8, nos 77–8, March–April 2002, 94–7.
‘They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got’, comments Marlow in the first chapter of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He is describing European adventurers. ‘It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much’; Joseph Conrad, Tales of Land and Sea (New York: Hanover House 1953), 37.
Michael Ward, in his otherwise novel study, Quantifying the World: UN Ideas and Statistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2004), misses the entire politics of literacy measurements, such as those encountered in the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report.
William Digby, quoted in Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso 2002), 8.
Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 39–40; this paragraph draws more generally on chs 1, 4, 5 and 10.
Ibid., 39. The exact diet at Buchenwald from 1939 until the liberation of the camp in 1945 is specified in The Buchenwald Report, trans. and ed. David A. Hackett (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1945), 146–9.
Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 39.
A particularly good example of such extreme insensitivity to, and mockery of, victims of development is Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2003).
For example, Betty Farber, Guiding Young Children's Behavior: Helpful Ideas for Parents and Teachers from 28 Early Childhood Experts (Garden City, NY: Preschool Publications 1998). The discussion in Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood (Cambridge: Polity Press 2001), is useful.
Some of these terms have other insidious histories: to take one example, ‘flexible’ capitalism is a short-hand for the corporate strategies that have led to ‘downsizing’, increase in part-time labour, the reduction of the permanent work force and the emasculation of labour unions. The discussion of development in this paragraph and the following draws largely on Lal, Empire of Knowledge, 111–13.
By ‘commons’ I mean not only the idea of shared public spaces, communal property and the common inheritance of communities (from the wisdom of the elders to shared knowledge about medicinal plants), but also everything that is implied in the phrase ‘moral economy’ as it is encountered in the writings of E. P. Thompson, the reflections of E. F. Schumacher and the intellectual and political practices of Mohandas Gandhi.
Ivan Illich, quoted in Claude Alvares, Science, Development and Violence: The Revolt against Modernity (Delhi: Oxford University Press 1994), 137.
Anthony Arnove, Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, rev. edn (Cambridge, MA: South End Press 2002).
Vinay Lal, The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press 2003).