EVENT
HELEN FEIN: I want to begin not just by thanking the US Holocaust Memorial Museum for bringing the question of genocide to public attention but also to thank you for coming. The persistence of genocide is a question most people would rather not think or talk about, a question which haunts a number of thoughtful people. What I will do tonight is to explore the extent of political death in this century, distinguish genocide from other killing, and tell you something in what I have learned of the causes of genocide. I will consider why the Holocaust may be a deceptive model, consider the case of Bosnia, and conclude on a note of sceptical optimism, giving you a notion of what could be done to deter genocide. So there is something to which you can look forward.
We begin this series with the consciousness of the scope and range of horrors in the twentieth century. This has been a century of murders by states and non-state actors--death squads, party paramilitaries, guerrillas--but mainly by states. One scholar, R. J. Rummel, has estimated that purposeful state killings of civilians, which he calls democide, have taken the lives of 169 million people in this century. Almost one-fourth of them (38.6 million or 22.8%) were victims of genocide. Others were victims of politicide, mass killing of political groups, indiscriminate state massacres, forced labor and concentration camps, of bombing of civilians, and of starvation imposed and reinforced by the state. The number of victims in this century surpasses the population of all but the five largest states in the world today.
Yet, the concept of genocide was only first articulated by Raphael Lemkin during the Second World War; later I’ll elaborate this. Such crimes were tried at Nuremberg as “crimes against humanity,” based on acts against civilians prohibited in the Hague Convention of 1907. However, this applied only to acts conducted during war or in preparation for war. The subsequent United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNGC)--hereinafter called the Genocide Convention-- applies to acts committed in peace and war, against the nationals of other states and against citizens of your state.
Regardless of the record and our need for clear thinking on these issues, some cynics doubt the existence of genocide as other than a rhetorical weapon because the concept of genocide has been diminished, vulgarized and banalized in public rhetoric. This has been done especially in the United States and is done by persons and groups (of all political persuasions) vying to aggrandize their cause as victims. Opposing policies labelled as genocide include school integration and segregation; voluntary and forced abortion; tolerating drug addiction and instituting methadone drug-control programs. Threats and trends labelled as genocide or genocidal include birth control, dieting, family planning, opposition to bi-lingual education and suburbanization. Calling an issue, a person, a phenomenon as genocide appears to many the ultimate charge, leaving no room for analysis or debate.
Since we are unlikely to get an international or national Truth-in-Labelling (or libelling) law and must go ahead, understanding this is the country that headlined a President’s firing four members of his administration a “Saturday Night Massacre,” and ignores real Saturday night massacres on the streets. Despite all these misuses, it is apparent from the daily newspapers that we need a clear concept of genocide to employ when it is appropriate. Definitions and indicators enable us to recognize the persistence of genocide, to monitor genocidal massacres and genocidal ideology in order to devise appropriate strategies to prevent it.
Since the Holocaust, genocides have been repeated on every continent; 13 to 20 cases have been documented. [Table 1, shown above and in your handout, shows cases between 1945 and 1988 in three continents or areas. Because of its geographical limits, it omits cases in the Soviet Union, Paraguay, and Guatemala]. Genocides and state political killings have taken the lives of over four times the number of people killed in war between 1900 and 1987 (including civilians) according to one recent survey.
Other surveys have led to similar findings. One team of scholars show that state killings between 1967 and 1986 have claimed more than twice as many lives as have wars. Similarly, state killings caused about two and a half times the number of lives lost in the aftermath of natural disasters between 1967 and 1986.
Genocide, said my caller from Zagreb (Dr. Slobodan Lang of the Helsinki Watch Committee), has become the most successful crime of this century. Unlike an occupation or colonial enterprise, its results can not be undone. Since 1992, the practice of genocide has reoccurred in Europe, where it was stopped, we had wishfully believed, forever.
We first need to understand how this has happened in order to figure out how we can change the habits of existing institutions and create new institutions to prevent and stop genocide. Although we often repeat the warning of Santayana that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, we often overlook the fact that not forgetting does not lead in itself to not repeating.
I do not mean to imply that history reiterates the same pattern mechanically regardless of what we do. For genocides, like other great and terrible events, are never the same entirely and yet reveal some common elements, rationales, and preconditions. In order to devise a strategy to stop genocide, we have to understand what it is. This has been muddled both by those people who see the Holocaust as the paradigm for other genocides and by those who see the Holocaust as radically unique.
Let us start by clarifying the terms. Both the terms “genocide” and the term “Holocaust” evoke controversies. The Holocaust is a term that came into currency in the 1960’s to describe what the Germans called “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” what Israelis call Shoah. Some use it only to refer to the annihilation of the Jews. I use it to refer to the train of genocides in World War 2, beginning with the Final Solution and going on to the collection and annihilation of the Gypsies.
The concept of genocide and the UNGC [Convention] are largely attributable to the writing and single-minded work of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish jurist, who gave up a career as a law professor in the Ivy League to lobby for the Convention in the halls of the United Nations. Lemkin first introduced the concept of genocide to explain German population and occupation policies in a book published in 1944. Genocide was the aim Lemkin perceived behind German plans to destroy whole nations and races both directly and indirectly. The Jews were to be destroyed immediately and completely. Other groups of non-related blood [such as the Poles] were to be depopulated, debilitated, and killed by “the following ways: 1. Racial discrimination in feeding...2. Endangering of Health...3. Mass Killings.” The notion of “cultural genocide” does not appear in Lemkin; he discriminated coerced denationalization and assimilation (“Germanization”) from genocide; the former was an option only for people of related blood--Dutchmen, Norwegians, Flemings, Luxembourgers.
Today, the authoritative definition of genocide is that of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], racial, or religious group as such:
- killing members of the group;
- causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Although the Convention has been international law since 1951, due to domestic opposition the United States only signed it and the Senate approved it as a treaty in 1988.
There has been much controversy over the UNGC definition. Many scholars and some lawyers are dissatisfied with the definition of the Convention for several reasons: the limitation of protected groups (omitting political, economic, social, and sexual groups), the problem of inferring intent, and the lack of specification of genocide “in part.” It does not seem to me that there is a perfect resolution to any of these problems. I believe that the Convention definition is a good one, a great advance in international law in the 20th century. Genocide had to be defined generically to protect groups whose enduring nature and right to exist was agreed upon. It was not agreed (and probably would not be agreed on today) that political groups--including the Nazi SA, Black September, the Party of God, and the Khmer Rouge--deserve special protection. It is not even agreed in even human rights convocations that homosexuals merit specific protection. The Convention definition is a workable one, I believe. We do not know to what extent it can stretch because we have no case law.
While the bounded limits of protected groups draw criticism, so does the unbounded limit of “intent to destroy...in part.” In order to detect genocide-in-the-making, it had to be defined to include destruction in part, to apprehend and stop genocide at an early stage. The UN could not set a numeric threshhold (e.g., over 10%) without giving an implicit license to kill to potential perpetrators.
The principal problem with the UNGC is that it can not be invoked by the victim directly but depends on states, usually the perpetrators or bystanders of genocide, to invoke it. This is akin to asking the wolves to guard the sheep. Even in cases in which the government which perpetrates genocide looses power or falls, as in the case of Bangla Desh and Cambodia, other states have not prosecuted the perpetrators.
Many scholars use briefer definitions for research. I have listed several definitions on the accompanying handout, including my own, which seeks to parallel the terms of the convention but to apply it to all collectivities--nonviolent groups with shared identification and values. My definition is that:
Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.
Scholars have different definitions which often reflect their research and other agendas. The dimensions or variable characteristics include in definition and classification include the political organization or opposition of the victims, the totality of perpetrator’s intent, and the defenselessness of the victims’ group.
Rather than read these definitions and comment on them, what I try to show in the next diagram (projected on the screen) is the actual import of the differences between my colleagues and myself in terms of extensiveness.
The narrowest and radically unique definition is that of Steven Katz, who defines only the attempted total annihilation of a people as genocide and considers the annihilation of the Jews during the Holocaust as the only case of genocide in history.
Katz does not consider the Gypsies as victims of genocide and says that they were gassed at Auschwitz because they had typhus. It is not clear whether this was a public health measure to protect the remaining Gypsies or the Jews. Katz’s criterion of totality of intent raises the question of how one could ever recognize and label a genocide in process as genocide until the crime was completed. Katz has replied to my criticism that his definition would not apprehend the Holocaust in process, as a genocide-in-the-making, by asserting that the Holocaust could be classified as a genocide, by his definition, by 1943.
This appears to me late in the day for an estimated 1,400,000 Jews (or 27.5% of Hilberg’s estimated total) had been killed by direct massacre and mobile killing operations in 1941 and 1942 before the extermination camps were opened.
Further, an additional 700,000 (13.7%) were estimated to have died indirectly from starvation and epidemics in ghettoes, a significant proportion of these occurring before 1943. About one in every five Jews in the Warsaw ghetto died from hunger and disease before the deportations of July 1942. It is clear that Katz’s definition, which radically departs from international law, does not enable us to detect genocide-in-the-making in a timely way, including that of the Jews during (rather than after) the Holocaust.
In the middle are a number of definitions which overlap in large part: those of Harff and Gurr, Fein, and Chalk and Jonassohn (which you can read at your leisure). This is a free-form diagram, and the space between them is not meant to be based on an exact metric.
The most expanded definition is that of Israel Charny, founder and President on the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide. Charny said in 1990 in reaction to my definition that he was “also uncomfortable that her definition is used to exclude a number of classes of mass murders such as of sundry political opponents or people perceived as dangerous to or antagonistic to a ruling government; murders of the unfit, aged, or ill, not as a class object but as worthless people or who constitute a burden on government; extensive mass murders engaged in by rival warring ethnic groups such as, at this writing, Zulu and ANC in South Africa; and mass murders of civilians in wartime strikes against an enemy such as by saturation bombing, nuclear bombing, or chemical and biological weapons.”
In including civilian victims of nuclear, fire-bombing and saturation bombing, Charny follows the example of Leo Kuper, who, despite the fact that he claimed to rely on the UNGC definition, asserted that the bombings of Dresden, and iroshima and Nagasaki in World War II and US bombings in Vietnam were instances of genocide. 13 Although I consider many of these acts war crimes and acts of terror, I do not agree that they were genocide intended to eliminate a defenseless group. This does not mean that the issues Charny and Kuper address--including nuclear and fire-bombing-- are not serious issues with moral and human-rights dimensions, but that they I believe that they are neither better understood nor stopped by labelling them as genocide.
In 1991, Charny proposed a “generic definition of genocide” with subdivisions relating to intentionality and contexts in which intentionality need not be present. “Genocide [said Charny] in the generic sense is the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims.”
What is distinct about Charny’s definition is the concept of mass killing. Rummel’s concept of “democide,”--death by government of masses--is similar. But Rummell differentiates genocide from democide; over three-fourths of the victims of democide are not victims of genocide. Because the breadth of Charny’s definition embraces virtually all state killing, I do not believe it is useful to understand the more specific crime of genocide.
There is a need, it seems to me, to put genocide and the Convention in the context of both human rights law and sociological theories of intergroup relations, collective violence, political violence, and state terror. I view genocide as a distinct act on a continuum of gross violations of human rights which result in deaths, including massacre, extra-judicial execution, disappearances,” and calculated political murders of selected individuals, a violation of life-integrity. Genocides and other state murders are most apt to be committed by totalitarian and authoritarian governments. Among the latter, there is often a history of intergroup violence--pogroms, communal massacres, race riots-- and rebellion which precede genocide. But most intergroup and political violence, such as that between supporters of the African National Congress and Inkatha (to which Charny alluded) prior to the transfer of power, does not escalate to genocide.
To detect and trace genocide, I devised a paradigm or set of conditions to look for:
- There was a sustained attack or continuity of attacks by the perpetrator to physically destroy group members;
- The perpetrator was a collective or organized actor or commander of organized actors;
- Victims were selected because they were members of a collectivity;
- The victims were defenseless or were killed regardless of whether they surrendered or resisted; and
- The destruction of group members was undertaken with intent to kill and murder was sanctioned by the perpetrator.
To detect genocides, we can not use the Holocaust as a mechanical model or template for the Holocaust was in many ways singular. To classify events, as some commentators do, by whether they are/or are not a Holocaust is like measuring viral fevers with a thermometer which only has markings of 96 and 106 degrees. Further, no one appreciated the magnitude of the Holocaust until it was over--perhaps because it was over.
The Holocaust is singular, I believe, because of at least two characteristics. Firstly, it was a transnational genocide, affording us the opportunity to observe the same process in country after country. This is unlikely to happen again, for a continental-wide victory, such as that of Nazi Germany, would not be tolerated in any continent. Second is its duration. It was the product of a ruler who had announced his fantasy or intent a decade before coming to power, almost two decades before the Final Solution began. Thus, the extent and length of warning time of intent is singular; it is only fair to say that not all scholars agree with this. Even if we restrict the length of warning-time to the date of inception of the Final Solution, June 1941, it went on for almost four whole years. Few dictators who precipitate genocide these days are so articulate or public about their intentions as was Adolf Hitler.
In retrospect, the Holocaust appears to be a pure case of the “innocent victim” who engages our sympathy, uninvolved in contention for power, unlike the victims of many contemporary genocides whom we might call “implicated victims.” The Jews of pre-war Europe are seen today as the archetypical innocent victims, making no political demands, willing, when living in occupied countries, to comply and work for Nazi Germany if left alone to live. This contrasts with the “implicated victims” more commonly seen today, groups in conflict with the perpetrator over the division of power or land. Yet, both the perception of the victim as innocent and the conflict as a “real” conflict largely depends on the preconceptions of the observer. Large numbers of Americans before the war were hostile to Jews and viewed them as somehow responsible for their persecution. Further, there is no reason to doubt that the symbolic conflict between Jew and Aryan was less “real” to the Nazi ideologues than were “real” geopolitical conflicts. So, the imputed innocence of the target group is not an indicator of whether they are or are not victims of genocide.
Genocides before and after the Second World War have had many instigators: ideological genocides in which governments act out the demands of their political formula or doctrine, such as the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and Cambodia, are in the minority. More common is retributive genocide, in which an elite of a dominant ethnic group destroys a significant part of another group which it fears will take its place as the dominant group. There are also developmental genocides, the destruction of indigenous people seen to be in the way of development, competing with the dominant group for land and resources. Lastly, there are despotic genocides to eliminate potential opponents, such as undertaken by Idi Amin in Uganda between 1971 and 1979.
What is common among genocides besides the will of the perpetrator to eliminate a significant part of a people, the organization of that will, is the exclusion of the Other--or victim group-- from the universe of obligation. The universe of obligation is the limits of the common conscience; those whom we are obligated to protect, to take into account, and to whom we must account.
This is a necessary but not sufficient condition. For genocide is a rational crime; it serves a function for the perpetrator and they estimate its cost and likelihood of success.
My view is that it is a strategy that ruling elites use to resolve real solidarity and legitimacy conflicts against victims decreed outside their universe of obligation in situations in which a crisis or opportunity is caused by or blamed on the victims and the perpetrators believe that they can get away with it. States and political cabals basing state legitimacy on likeness or ethnic homogeneity, such as in Nazi Germany and Rwanda, have an intrinsic motive or doctrine to exclude and remove others who do not fit in their universe by definition.
While democratic states are checked from murdering their citizens, totalitarian and authoritarian states are not. A crisis or opportunity often precipitates the rationale for genocide. However, the perpetrator must count on bystander states not intervening; perpetrator states still recall, as Hitler put it, that the world only remembers success. And some perpetrators, such as Idi Amin, regard Hitler as a hero.
War is both a trigger and mask for genocide for many reasons; it enables the killers to hide the crime and to blame the victim; and in some cases it provokes them to resolve conflict by eliminating the victim. The use of genocide increased threefold in wars in Africa, Asia, and the Mid-East between 1968 and 1988 from the preceding twenty years.
Although totalitarian and authoritarian states have been the major perpetrators of genocide in this century, democratizing states may sanction or tolerate massacres in certain conditions. The breakup of empires and federated multi-national states, as in the cases of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia presents both opportunities and crises which have instigated genocide and may continue to do so. Competition among ethnic groups for land and resources and the manipulation of memory by chauvinist leaders along with the ill-chosen policies of Serbia and Croatia and of the European community led to the formation of two republics, Serbia and Croatia, with contradictory recollections of genocide in the Independent State of Croatia between 1941 and 1945. Serbs identified with the victims; Croatian nationalists with the perpetrators. This predisposed ethnic Serbs to break away from both Croatia and Bosnia, despite the fact that Bosnia aimed to be a democratic and multicultural state.
“Ethnic cleansing”--an old policy in the Balkans--used in the current war by both Serbs and Croats, can easily merge into genocide--genocide “in part” in the terms of the UNGC. The aid of Serbia and criminal Serbian paramilitary organizations led to genocide in Bosnia: systematic killing, torture, rape, theft and expulsions. This genocide was recognized in the United States in 1992 by the Institute for the Study of Genocide, Helsinki Watch, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the US Committee for Refugees.
Those who employ the Holocaust as a mechanical model, pointing in August 1992 to concentration camps in which many Bosnian Muslims were murdered, missed the similarity of the process of genocide in Bosnia to that of other genocides. In many ways, the means of genocide in Bosnia recall the earlier genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire rather than the Holocaust. Besides the sifting of population by religio-ethnic identity, the stripping of Muslims of rights and property, the use of expulsions and deportations leading to death, there is the widespread use of rape as a tool to torture, to humiliate, to drive out, to destroy the family and create unwanted children of the oppressor’s group. This was usually absent during the Holocaust because of the German ban on intercourse with Jews and belief it was polluting the blood. Robert Melson, who has compared the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide in Revolution and Genocide (1992) says, “Two major similarities between the Armenian genocide and the partial genocide occuring in Bosnia should be apparent. Like the Young Turks, the Serbian, and to some extent the Croat, nationalists are also dreaming of a large state that would include their peoples and exclude other ethnic and national groups. Like the Armenians, the Muslims, an ethnoreligious community making claims to land, are being massacred and driven out by Serb and Croat nationalist movements that seek to incorporate their lands and ‘cleanse’ the area of their presence and to destroy their culture.”
Except for feeding the victims, the international community has responded not very differently in Bosnia than it did Europe in 1942-1945 when it only began to do anything to rescue the victims in 1944, too late to be effective for deterrence although it could have and in part did deter deportations from German satellite countries.
There has been the debate on the innocence of the victims in former Yugoslavia and the counter-claim that all sides are guilty. Make no mistake about this: the claim of equal responsibility for crimes and the denial that genocide was occurring in Bosnia was a necessary step to enable the US and European signatories to deny their responsibility to prevent genocide under the Genocide Convention.
This is best shown in an interview with US Secretary of State Warren Christopher on May 18, 1993:
“Mr. Christopher said Bosnia was a ‘morass’ of deep hatreds...where ‘there are atrocities on all sides.’ His clear message was that the Muslims in Bosnia are not the Jews of World War II Europe, and that if there is no victim, then there is no moral imperative for the United States to intercede.
“‘It’s somewhat different from the Holocaust,” Mr. Christoper told Representative Gary L. Ackerman, the New York Democrat, who asked whether ‘ethnic cleansing’ wasn’t the same as genocide. ‘It’s been easy to analogize this to the Holocaust, but I never heard of any genocide by the Jews against the German people.’”
We have seen the denial that anything can be done without overwhelming costs, overlooking the logical alternatives: to a) remove or deter the perpetrator, b) remove the victims, or c) arm the victims to defend themselves. However, the action in February 1994 to end the bombardment of Sarajevo and in September 1995 to protect the remaining safe havens illustrates how much even modest force changes the limits. It is unfortunate that the United States lost the opportunity to make a principled condemnation of ethnic cleansing by Croatia which expelled most of the Serbs of the Krajina in September and tolerated anonymous murders of many remaining aged Serbs.
Between 1992 and 1995, the United Nations and the European Community asked the perpetrators to negotiate with the victims, putting the powerful and powerless on an equal status. Instead of devising a strategy for prevention, the United States in the United Nations focussed on establishing a war crimes tribunal to ensure war crimes and genocide would not go unpunished just as on 17 December 1942, the allies publicly vowed that the extermination of the Jews was a crime whose perpetrators “shall not escape retribution,” making no attempt to deter the ongoing extermination.
The resurgence of fascism and exclusive nationalism in Europe, the demonization of opponents in ethnic conflicts around the globe, the strenuous and insidious campaign of denial of the Holocaust, and the new public level of group hatred in many places show there is widespread readiness to accept genocide. Although readiness need not necessarily be transformed to action, it is a disturbing omen.
For many years, it was believed that teaching about the Holocaust was enough to deter its repetition. Today we know that to remember the Holocaust is not enough; indeed, remembrance of genocide itself can become an icon, and in some cases, be perverted to justify new genocidal massacres.
So far the Genocide Convention has been a dead letter. But there are signs this may not always be so. What we need today is a vision of a proactive policy, in contrast to business as usual, which led the west in the last decade to build up Iraq, to keep the Khmer Rouge a going concern, to overlook genocide in Bosnia, and to reject intervention to deter genocide in Rwanda after arming the perpetrators.
Because Barbara Harff will talk later about what can be done to prevent and stop genocide, making a fine presentation, I will not go into the many means at our disposal. However, to do this at all, we need a renewed will. We have to struggle with the deniers, with the moral isolationists, and with our own fears and prejudices. On a political level, we have to wrestle with doctrines of realpolitik--the notion that the state is merely a self-interested organization to preserve its political and economic resources--and realize that our most lasting resource is our values. Material resources, such as oil, are depleted by drawing on them. But values can be replenished by drawing on them. While we need an affirmation of hope, what we do not need is empty rhetoric. It is too late to say “Never again” again. For it has happened again and again and again.
Notes:
- R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 4.
- The most recent survey of Harff and Gurr estimates that between 1945 and 1995, there were 7 episodes of “pure” genocides, and 13 “mixed” cases, 7 in which both communal and political victims were targetted (as in Rwanda in 1994) and 6 in which the victims were primarily political but discriminated communally; see Barbara Harff and Ted R. Gurr, “Victims of the State: Genocides, Politicides, and Group Repression from 1945 to 1995,” in Genocides in the 20th Century (Leiden: PIOOM Foundation, forthcoming).
- R. J. Rummel, “Genocide and Mass Murder: The Black Hole in Peace Research” (University of Hawaii: unpublished ms., October 20, 1993), 3-5.
- Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr, “Genocides and Politicides since 1945: Evidence and Anticipation,” Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide, 13 (December 1987), 1-7. My calculation is based on recompiling their figures to assess victims from each cause for the same period of time.
- Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 1944), 79-88.
- Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage Publications, 1993), p. 24.
- Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context Vol. 1: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 126-135.
- “It is apposite to note in this context, in addition, that the two relatively large ‘operations’ against the Gypsies at Auschwitz...were due, in at least large if not full measure, to reasons of communicable diseases. Both ‘actions’ are accounted for in the sources as the consequence of ‘suspected typhus cases,’ and there is reason to believe that this was, in fact, the motivation behind these two special odious events.” Steven T. Katz, “Quantity and interpretation: Issues in the comparative analysis of the Holocaust,” in Remembering for the Future [Papers to be presented at an International Scholars Conference to be held in Oxford, 10-13 July 1988] Supplementary Volume (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1988), 213.
- Steven T. Katz, “Reply to ‘Critics’: For Holocaust and Genocide Conference,” a paper prepared for the conference of the Association of Genocide Scholars at the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, Virginia), June 1995, 13-14.
- Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 767.
- Charles G. Roland, Courage Under Siege: Starvation, Disease and Death in the Warsaw Ghetto (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 224-225.
- Israel Charny, Review of Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, in Current Sociology, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring 1990), Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide Issue 30-31 (February 1991), 5-6.
- Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981): 34-35, 46, 102, 255; see also Index: Vietnam, U.S. involvement in, as genocide.
- Israel Charny, “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide,” in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions ed. George J. Andreopoulos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 76-77.
- See Note 1.
- Rummel, Death by Government, 16-19.
- Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, 25-27.
- Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1979), 175-176.
- This typology and its sources is elaborated in Fein,Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, 28-31.
- David Martin, General Amin (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), 11.
- Helen Fein, “Accounting for genocide after 1945: theories and some findings,” International Journal on Group Rights I (1993), 95.
- Robert Melson, “Paradigms of Genocide: The Holocaust and Armenian Genocide as Precedents for Contemporary Mass Destructions,” paper presented at “Remembering for the Future II Conference, Berlin, 13-17 March, 1994”, 20-22.
- Interview reported by Elaine Sciolino, New York Times, May 19, 1993.
