Raphaël Lemkin, Originator of the word “genocide” and leader of the global movement to outlaw genocide at the United Nations.
Raphaël Lemkin did not define genocide as an act of mass killing. He saw genocide as a type of conflict that sometimes escalated into direct violence, but not always. In Lemkin’s analysis of genocide, we find a theory of group destruction that involves systems of repression and oppression, direct and indirect violence, structural and cultural violence, a direct link between the economic destruction of targeted groups and their cultural suppression, and the denial of the victims’ right to exist because of their social identity—all in an effort to eradicate group identities from the fabric of society.
Yet, genocide was often committed by people who did not think they were committing genocide, and often held no hate in their hearts. For Lemkin, what made genocide so difficult to prevent was that it involved “countless small and different actions that, when taken separately, constituted different crimes, or sometimes did not constitute a crime at all, but when taken together constituted a type of atrocity that threatened the existence of social collectivities and threatened the peaceful social order of the world.”
genocide is a gradual process and may begin with political disenfranchisement, economic displacement, cultural undermining and control, the destruction of leadership, the break-up of families and the prevention of propagation. Each of these methods is a more or less effective means of destroying a group. Actual physical destruction is the last and most effective phase of genocide”
“I Just Keep Talking,” a collection of essays and artwork by the historian Nell Irvin Painter, captures her wide-ranging interests and original mind.
As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has learned over the course of her eight decades on this earth, inspiration can come from some unlikely places.
In 2000, she happened across a news photograph of Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya, which had been bombed into rubble during the long stretch of devastating wars between Russia and the Caucasus. The photo prompted Painter to wonder how “Caucasian” became a term for white people; that in turn led her to an 18th-century German naturalist who picked out five skulls to embody the five “varieties” of mankind. What he deemed “the really most beautiful form of skull” belonged to a young Georgian woman and would therefore represent Caucasians, whom he called “the most beautiful and best formed of men.”
From a photograph of bombed-out Grozny to the absurd methodology of a German naturalist: Painter’s research for the best-selling “The History of White People” (2010) was born.
“It was as though I lost my head, you boiled off all the flesh and the brains and eyeballs out of it, and you called it ‘New Jersey Variety of Mankind,’” she writes about the Georgian’s skull in “I Just Keep Talking,” a collection of her essays and artwork that includes a number of such characteristically irreverent asides. Painter was a historian at Princeton before enrolling in art school at the age of 64. In 2018, she recalled the experience in a freewheeling memoir. “I Just Keep Talking” presents Painter in full, gathering personal reflections, scholarly essays and images spanning several decades to convey the range of her interests and ambition.
Painter went on to study that hurt in depth, writing about slavery’s persistent legacy of violence. But she has also emphasized the historical importance of Black resourcefulness and creativity. One of her books traced the Exoduster migration of formerly enslaved people to Kansas in 1879; another told the life story of the antislavery activist Sojourner Truth. Born enslaved, the charismatic Truth knew she had to be canny when it came to her self-presentation. One photograph she circulated included her statement: “I sell the shadow to support the substance.”
This discrepancy between one’s sense of self and how that self is received and remembered has long fascinated Painter. One essay in “I Just Keep Talking” explains why the line most associated with Truth — “Ar’n’t I a woman?” — is something that Truth almost certainly did not say; it was more probably the fabrication of a white antislavery writer, who added the phrase in her account in order to portray Truth as a “colorful force of nature” and amp up the drama. Painter doesn’t deny that the theatricality was effective, dovetailing with Truth’s own deployment of a “naïve persona,” but it also flattened her into a caricature, obscuring the quiddity of the woman she actually was.
To understand broad trends, it can often be helpful to dig into a particular case. With respect to the tumult over the encampments protesting the US-backed Israeli offensive in Gaza, it would be hard to find a more illuminating example than Columbia University. Here, we may observe students’ sincere concern for the least among us, on one hand, and their ambitious social climbing, on the other. Here, we can clearly recognize elite institutions’ deep commitment to sterile forms of activism—and we can readily see how identitarian and safetyist approaches to “social justice” are weaponized in the service of the status quo. At Columbia, we can most readily perceive the jarring dissonance between the spectacle of unrest over Gaza and the realities of the conflict that has been overshadowed by the spectacle.
But let’s start with some basic facts.
On April 17, Columbia’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, appeared before the US House of Representatives to testify about the prevalence and nature of anti-Semitism on campus. Eager to avoid the fate of her peers at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, Shafik kept her head down and assented to assertions that Columbia, and universities writ large, are awash in Jew-hatred, and that Columbia wasn’t doing enough to fight it. Over the course of the three-hour hearing, she paid comparatively little attention to pro-Palestine students who have faced assaults, doxxing, and alleged harassment—including by professors—under her watch. She also didn’t voice any objection when the term “intifada” was equated with hate speech, despite knowing well—as a native Arabic speaker born in Egypt—that the term is used broadly for mass uprisings in many contexts; it’s how the Warsaw Uprising is described in Arabic.
Unlike her peers at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, Shafik offered few appeals to academic freedom and made little mention of the role of universities as places where people must confront difficult ideas and disagreeable views. Instead, she proudly touted her suspension of Jewish Voice for Peace and other campus groups and her wider crackdown against unsanctioned speech. At one point in the hearing, she even vowed to remove Joseph Massad, a tenured professor who had made controversial statements, from a leadership post, without regard for due process.
As the president was debasing herself in Washington, Columbia students set up an encampment to host demonstrations against the war. Although the NYPD assertedon April 18 that the protests were nonviolent and non-harassing, and that the students complied with all instructions, Shafik upon returning to New York called the cops, who showed up in riot gear to break up the encampment immediately, leading to the arrest of more than 100 students.
Despite Shafik’s servile testimony and the immediate crackdown, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York and other GOP leaders called for her resignation. After all, the president had testified that under her leadership, Columbia had become an anti-Semitic hellscape. The encampments and heavy-handed response were all the proof lawmakers needed that the situation wasn’t under control. And indeed, rather than ending the protests, the clampdown at Columbia spurred a wave of solidarity encampments at other elite universities in the United State and abroad—an “Ivy League Intifada.”
It wasn’t just peer institutions that got in on the action: A new, even larger, encampment quickly returned to Columbia as well. Given how badly her previous response had backfired, Shafik vowed not to involve the NYPD with dismantling this encampment, pledging to negotiate with the protesters for an amicable resolution instead.
However, amid concerns about the university putting its best face forward with graduation fast approaching, the negotiations collapsed, and Shafik announced unequivocally that the university “will not divest from Israel.” Her administration then began trying to identify and suspend participants in the encampments; many students abandoned the protest at this point.
Others responded to this escalation by taking their civil disobedience to the next level. A contingent of students broke into and occupied Hamilton Hall in an overt attempt to evoke the 1968 anti-Vietnam protests—a history that Columbia’s leadership often celebrates. The occupiers received the same type of reception as their predecessors. Shafik immediately called upon the NYPD to clear out all vestiges of the encampment and to retain a strong presence on campus through graduation. The police showed up in force, again in full riot gear, guns drawn. Professional journalists were largely prohibited from covering the raid, on penalty of arrest, and student journalists were likewise threatened if they left Pulitzer Hall (although they still did one hell of a job reporting on the clampdown, all the same). Despite the communication blackout, surfaced videos show that although the police weren’t met with violence, they meted out plenty of it; one officer even discharged his weapon (fortunately, failing to hit anyone).
This authoritarian response likewise failed to break the will of demonstrators. If anything, it only boosted the students’ commitment to resisting Columbia’s administration. For instance, many students, barred from protesting on campus, have carried out demonstrations in front of trustees’ homes, even as Shafik herself has been publicly shamed when spotted by outraged students.
In recognition of the reality that erstwhile demonstrators remain highly committed to exerting pressure on Columbia, the university remains locked down, and all classes have been moved online. The commencement ceremony Shafik was so eager to protect has been canceled, because it’s clear that attending students would almost certainly use the event to engage in further activism—disruptions she is unwilling, and perhaps unable, to countenance.
India is no longer the model free-market democracy that Westerners spent years imagining, encouraging, and touting. With Prime Minister Narendra Modi having bent the media, big business, and democratic institutions to his will, India’s markets and politics are becoming less free – as the ongoing election is set to confirm.
HONG KONG – A couple of months before India’s general election began on April 19 (voting will continue until June 1), the opposition Indian National Congress made a stunning disclosure at a press conference in New Delhi. Apparently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government had frozen some of the party’s main bank accounts and slapped it with an outsize bill for a minor tax-filing lapse five years earlier, leaving it with no money even to pay for electricity or salaries, let alone conduct an election campaign. The freeze was soon lifted, but the message was clear: this wasn’t going to be a regular election.
Though Congress had ruled India for most of the period since independence in 1947, Modi’s rise to national power in 2014 has left the party flailing. Congress officials decried the account freeze as a “deep assault on India’s democracy,” but this was merely the latest example in a longer-running saga. Modi’s government has spent a decade eroding civil liberties and minority rights, curtailing dissent, undermining democratic institutions, and building a cult of personality. While Western governments continue to pretend that India is the world’s largest democracy, the country is beginning to resemble a Central Asian dictatorship.
