ABSTRACT
If genocide is the murder, not simply the destruction, of a people, then genocide can never be justifiable but is always an evil. I will defend the view that genocide is a kind of murder, even when it is non-homicidal. It is not obvious what it means to murder a people. Neither is it obvious that genocide can never be justified, especially on my hypothesis that social death is central to genocide. For, the vitality lost in social death can surely include evil forms. And so, I am led to explore further than I did a decade ago the implications of the social death hypothesis. I aim to show also its helpfulness for making progress with such commonly asked questions as:
How do genocides differ from non-genocidal mass atrocities?
As a crime, is genocide redundant, given other war crimes and crimes against humanity in International Humanitarian Law? Does it identify something distinct?
Is genocide the worst crime, or greatest evil, imaginable?
Against whom or what can genocide be committed? Could there be a gay genocide? Is femicide a kind of genocide? What about people with disabilities? Evil groups?
What kinds of acts can be genocidal? What about expulsion? Mass rape?
I borrow the social death concept from historian Orlando Patterson (1982: 5–9). He used it to describe the plight of slaves captured in Africa who survived the middle passage to the Americas. They had been torn from their roots, chained together with captives who spoke other languages, and in the New World were continually robbed of the security of family connections through the practice of selling off children, spouses, and other kin. In the Americas, Patterson argued, relationships among slaves had no social sanctions or security. Slaves were, as he put it, socially dead. Later generations born to a condition of social death he called natally alienated—cut off from social ties in both directions, to ancestors and to progeny (Patterson 1982: 7). These hypotheses are controversial among historians who take seriously the idea of slave culture (Stuckey 1987). If Patterson’s critics are right, genocides may offer clearer instances of social death than was offered by slavery in the Americas.