Anti Natalism | Genocide - Never Again? @antinatalism1 | Uploaded November 2022 | Updated October 2024, 18 hours ago.
Never Again? That was the mantra after the Holocaust. The promises of Never Again were hope not history.
What's in a word like genocide. For the world in Rwanda in 1994 it meant obligation to action. But there was no political will. When there is no political will the next thing to do is change the definition to allow for inaction. To justify suffering and genocide. Never Again? Just change the word or deny the suffering. How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide? Just a slight change in the meaning of a word can paralyze action and allow a million souls in Rwanda to go down in a grisly fate.
And there was, very famously, an exchange that the State Department had with a journalist, where they asked very point blank, “Is this a genocide?” And the State Department said, “Well, there are acts of genocide that are being committed.” And the journalist responded, “Well, how many acts of genocide does it take to make a whole genocide?”
“We are in the presence of a crime without a name,” Winston Churchill said in a 1941 speech. At the time of the Holocaust, there was no legal definition for an atrocity on such an enormous scale. And there wouldn’t be one for seven more years—until the United Nations adopted the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Never Again? That was the mantra after the Holocaust. The promises of Never Again were hope not history.
What's in a word like genocide. For the world in Rwanda in 1994 it meant obligation to action. But there was no political will. When there is no political will the next thing to do is change the definition to allow for inaction. To justify suffering and genocide. Never Again? Just change the word or deny the suffering. How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide? Just a slight change in the meaning of a word can paralyze action and allow a million souls in Rwanda to go down in a grisly fate.
And there was, very famously, an exchange that the State Department had with a journalist, where they asked very point blank, “Is this a genocide?” And the State Department said, “Well, there are acts of genocide that are being committed.” And the journalist responded, “Well, how many acts of genocide does it take to make a whole genocide?”
“We are in the presence of a crime without a name,” Winston Churchill said in a 1941 speech. At the time of the Holocaust, there was no legal definition for an atrocity on such an enormous scale. And there wouldn’t be one for seven more years—until the United Nations adopted the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
