The Rhetoric and Revival of the Word: Genocide

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric Of Motives. New York : Prentice-Hall, 1952 [c1950]. Print.
Denich, Bette. "Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and the Symbolic Revival of Genocide" (1994)

What do we mean by "genocide"?  How do our terms color our conceptualization of an idea, event, an act? How do we appropriate a term for our rhetorical purposes? Is it deceptive?

Burke writes that the basic function of rhetoric is  the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents.  In place of rhetoric might be science. Science is a semantic or descriptive terminology for charting the conditions of nature from an impersonal point of view, regardless of one's wishes or preferences.  If, however, there is a "wish," it is more than descriptive but hortatory. "It is not just trying to tell how things are, in strictly 'scenic' terms; it is trying to move people" (41). The statement(s) might include particular details or information, but the call is not scientific but rhetorical.  Thus, if scientific language is a preparation for action, rhetorical language is inducement to action(or to attitude, attitude being an incipient act).

The word "genocide" while immersed in scientific vocabularies is rhetorical and thus appropriated "to move people."   This word, coined by Rafael Lemkin in 1944, represents physical aspects of genocide in The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide formally presented on December 9, 1948 and ratified in 1951. "Genocide" is any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

  "Genocide" represents a history and a future. It names atrocities and appropriates historical imagery for future political, economic, and social action. Burke writes of "the future"  as "not the sort of thing one can put under a microscope, or even test by knowledge of exactly equivalent conditions in the past." And so the term lies outside strictly scientific vocabularies of description and is situated in the frame of political exhortation. Burke tells us,"For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols" (43).  However, the problem with  "genocide,"  and the reason why the phrase "Never Again" is an empty assertion, is because for a symbol to induce action, the beings in the exchange must be equal. As a term used by one symbol-using entity to induce action in another of equal status, "genocide" is an example of rhetoric between beings of unequal status; one being is not free to act. The word's rhetorical function is no longer wholly realistic but idealistic in this realm of inequality.  Thus, when one appropriates the term "genocide," there is inherently a rhetorical and perhaps deceptive motive -- one that is the antithesis of Rafael Lemkin's intention to make "genocide" real, measurable, identifiable, and thus capable of preventing and punishing. It is an term that while it does induce pity and disgust, it does not wholly moving people to prevent or punish (although I think we can consider the ICC as taking steps towards this).The guerrilla movement, however, appropriate the term genocide for their own cause. Predominantly middle class students, activists and former government workers, the guerrillas cultivated an image of solidarity with the peasants (Maya and poor ladinos). While there were some peasants who took up arms with the guerrillas, most were stuck in the middle of the conflict between the government and the guerrillas.

If we think about the "genocide" in Guatemala in the 1980s, we can see why "genocide" worked as an idealistic rhetoric rather than realistic.  When Pamela Yates produced When Mountains Tremble in 1982 showing "the acts" -- the Guatemalan government killing of members of indigenous groups, the Maya;  causing serious bodily harm to members of a group, the Maya; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction; and imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group -- she was not free to prevent or punish the acts. She used the term genocide in her movie to set up a rhetorical situation to induce action. But what sort of action? What the documentary represented was a common logic of structural exclusion in which a nation's control over territory is taken to mean the literal absence of others. In this case the nationalist ideology of primarly Ladino land owners were exclusive in a symbolic and real sense defining the relationship between the state/landowners and indigenous peoples. What Yates showed went beyond the symbolic exclusion to the literal excision of Maya from the body politic.

The members who signed The Convention are the ones obliging their governments to prevent and punish, yet the dynamics between members and the accused are not equal. One being is not free to act.  The word "genocide" has an idealistic rhetorical function when we see it being used in the media for policy and philanthropy. When Colin Powell used the word genocide to name the atrocities in Darfur in 2004, the Illinois Senate wrote a mandate requiring all public schools to teach and additional unit on genocide (in addition to, not with or instead of a unit on the Holocaust). What, then, was the function of the word "genocide" in this other document, an educational mandate? What rhetorical value would the word carry between the a state senate and school districts, between school districts and teachers, between teachers and students. What rhetorical value would that word carry in the curriculum industry?

Just as the ideology of nationalism does not in itself induce political action, the naming of an act does not in itself induce action. The transformation from idea to action involves a series of symbolic processes that mediate communication between leaders and people invoking them to think, feel, and act collectively according to the premise of the ideology.  Such symbols as we see with the word genocide have emotional and cognitive meaning, so the transmittal of nationalist ideologies (as with Aryan, Serbian and Croatian,Hutu, Turks) from "the intellectual sphere to that of mass politics can be seen as involving the manipulation of symbols with polarizing emotional content " (Denich 369). Denich, in her article "Dismembering Yugoslavia" explains WWII ethnic conflict as something deliberately minimized by the Tito regime by suppressing symbolic reminders (like The Pigeon Cave production that explored Serbian nationalism) and then revived  with symbolic presentations that dismembered Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. During the Tito regime, survivors of the WWII massacres had to quietly remember the dead by visiting pigeon caves and other unmarked burial sites. The Tito regime did not want to commemorate the burial sites because it did not want reminders of the nationalist ideologies of WWII.  Not long after the suppression of the performance of "The Pigeon Cave," came an outburst of art, literature and scholarship on national themes portraying Serbian history and the context of the WWII genocide. The Serbian nationalist revitalization appropriated "genocide" for their cause to secede from Yugoslavia as its own state. Both Serbs and Croats turned to formulations of nationhood, the excision of ethnic groups from territory, and thus resurrected a framework that had culminated in the pigeon caves, the Ustasha massacres of Serbs by Croats in 1941: genocide 

In this case, we see how genocide is used to argue for a homogenous state. Denich writes, " In order to 'avoid in the future the great suffering with the Serbs' neighbors inflict upon them whenever then have an opportunity to do so,' the Chetniks proposed a 'homogenous Serbia'" ( 375).

Transfers and exchanges of population, especially of Croats from the Serbian and of Serbs from the Croatian areas, is the only way to arrive at their separation and to create better relations between them, and thereby remove the possibility of a repetition of the terrible crimes that occurred even in the First World War, but especially during this war, in the entire area in which the Serbs and Croats live intermixed, and where the Croats and Moslems have undertaken in a calculated way the extermination of the Serbs. (Quoted by Tomasevich 1975: 167; see also Milovanovic 1986: 261-275)

 On July 25, 1990 the new government of Croatia took office as a real action of division and ethnic opposition. Still symbolic was the exclusion of non-Croat when the Utasha flag was raised. Serbs knew the coat-of-arms symbol represented the very nationalism that massacred Serbs years ago. Denich argues that "the reappearance of the symbols associated with genocide must be examined in light of memories that had been both individually and collectively repressed and, in light of their transformation, over a half-century, into a cultural artifact of a particular sort" (381). Vuk Draskovic, a Serbian novelist wrote, "If war comes, I fear most for the fate of the Croatian people. In Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia there isn't a Serb to whom the Croats don't owe several liters of blood. There isn't a house in which someone wasn't massacred....So I understand why Serbs, if war comes, would like to fight against the Croats" (Borba 1991). Denich clarifies that the modern Serbs had not experienced the Utasha genocide, and "their wartime suffering had come at the hands of the Germans...rather than Croats"; however, the pigeon caves were exhumed literally and figuratively. Both Serbs and Croats used the narratives of genocide from their ancestors in 1990 for their own nationalist agenda by conducting a memorial ceremony in 1990 to exhume collective graves and reintement the remains with Orthodox burial rites.

Okay, here we might talk about what is happening in the Highlands of Guatemala as we speak with the exhumation of mass graves and the Spanish courts to charge Rios Montt with genocide. There is a Pan-Maya revival happening, but I don't think this is nationalist in the same way as the Serbs and Croats appropriated the term.

The effect of publicizing the Ustasha atrocities was to "kindle animosity toward the Croat perpetrators of violence against fellow Serbs and toward the current nationalist government, with its revival of Ustasha symbols." Denich explains that rather than renaming the issue as one of minority rights within Croatia (as the Maya seem to be doing -- although they are not minorities in ethnic numbers but rather an economic minority), it became a call to arms.

David Apter calls this moment in history a "disjunctive moment" when relations of power are transformed through reformulations of ideology that combine theory with power. Denich writes, "The political effect of mythical thinking is to polarize" (382), and I think this is what Burke may mean when he says rhetoric becomes idealistic when the beings exchanging the symbol are unequal. Perhaps the word is mythical -- or magical (I think Burke calls it at some point) -- but genocide is a word that is "used" only for the ideal of nationalism. Serbs, Croats, even the Maya are or have appropriated this word for their ethnic identity or cause and/or power.  The universalistic premise of constitutional democracy was not necessarily the goal. For survivors of "acts," prevention and punishment might have been a motive for appropriating genocide, but I am not so sure that Lemkin imagined that the Serbs would use genocide as an argument for another one. I think the Maya are taking steps for justice, but the the Pan Maya movement has elements of nationalism. 

So I think that as we comply with the mandate to teach a unit on genocide or as we make changes in our curriculum to  build knowledge, enlarge experience, and broaden worldviews. We can see this unit as about preparing to students to participate globally. Instead of teaching about "genocide," a word that I think we have established as being politically charged and even deceptively appropriated, we can teach about globalization and its impact on democratic principles. We can do inquiry into the standard narratives looking for gaps to do inquiry.