The frame of genocide

Since my move to Chico in the summer of 2018, I’ve been enjoying Fin Dwyer’s excellent Irish History podcast, mostly while I amble home from a long day of teaching. A few months ago he released an episode dealing with whether or not the Great Hunger – the famine that lasted from 1845 to 1849 – can be fairly called a genocide. Aside from the questions raised by applying the term to this particular historical event, the discussion made me think about the powerful role even a single word can play in debate, and what that tells us about how rhetoric can operate as a strategy for enforcing a certain frame on political conflict.

First though, let’s consider Dwyer’s approach to this question and his ultimate conclusion. Dwyer begins with a basic definition of genocide; genocide is “an attempt to exterminate a people or a subgroup of a population through out and out violence or just policies that lead to death.” Therefore, the question to Dwyer hinges on whether or not the British intended to exterminate the Irish population or, at least part of it. To unpack this question, he explores the dynamics that led to the death of a million Irish people to see if they are comprehendible within that definition.

First, he argues that it is quite clear that the British government was responsible for the ultimate death toll in Ireland. Not only had governments already intervened in similar events, setting the precedent and establishing the possibility of effective intervention, but London also had the resources to do so, and the infrastructure in Ireland, while not spectacular, was sufficient to carry it out.

However, the British response, such as there was, lacked any coherence. Between the beginning and the end of the famine, the party in power in Parliament changed, with the new, 1846 liberal government adhering to strict free market policies that simply aggravated the famine. When an increase in deaths resulted – to the tune of hundreds of thousands – the government relented and temporarily provided funds for direct relief through soup kitchens. This policy was much more effective in reducing deaths, but precisely because the British could point to improvement, they used that success as an excuse to end such relief just a few months after it had been initiated. Instead, all responsibility for funding relief was handed over to the Irish elite. As Dwyer puts it, taken together these policies represent “a ruthless experiment in laissez-faire economics with the lives of the Irish people.” But was the primary goal here ideological commitment to laissez-faire, or the extermination of the Irish?

While racism certainly played a role – Parliament would have felt far more compelled to intervene had the victims been English Protestants – Dwyer does not see it as determinative. The most shocking policy pursued by the liberal parliament, the continued exportation of food while thousands were starving, was not only supported by committed English liberals, but also the wealthier Irish farmers who stood to profit from continuing to export. It was not only the English who pushed for the policy of continued exportation, but these more affluent Irish themselves, who welcomed the security British troops offered against their angry, poorer, and indeed starving neighbors. So here, class is revealed as just as essential to the dynamics of the ultimate death toll as race.

Therefore, Dwyer concludes that using the term genocide in reference to the Great Hunger does not help us understand how it happened any better, and I have to agree. The English certainly didn’t worry themselves too much over thousands of Irish deaths but neither, it appears, did the Irish elite. As Dwyer puts it, “while they undoubtedly lacked compassion, and illustrated contempt for their neighbors, a contempt that had fatal consequences in many cases, this does not make the people involved in the export trade less Irish.”

However, this discussion got me thinking about the politics of labels closer to home. On a fairly regular basis, a controversy pops up about whether what happened to the indigenous people of South and North America can be called a genocide. Several questions reoccur when this is considered. Since so many native people died of disease, and spreading disease is not an act of agency in the same way directly killing people is, can it count as genocide? Can we refer to the massive loss of life in both continents as genocide, or should we only apply that term selectively when it is clear – as it often was – that Europeans attempted to wipe out entire societies? Shouldn’t we go on a tribe-by-tribe, region by region basis rather than using a sweeping term packed with emotional intensity? Wouldn’t “ethnic cleansing” be a more appropriate term to describe situations where wholesale murder was not the preferred method of control but forced removal from the boundaries of the new settler society?

We could go on like this, of course. These questions are debated, but unlike the situation in Ireland, race does not appear as merely contributory or incidental, but absolutely key. Moreover, while anti-Irish sentiment does still exist, and played a role in UK politics as recently as the Troubles, the current situation of the Irish peoples bares no close resemblance to the continued struggle of native peoples in both North and South America to survive the continued legacies of murder, removal, and dispossession.

But the difference I would like to ruminate on is the relative importance, in each case, of whether or not the term genocide is used. Precisely because oppression against native peoples is ongoing in a manner not comparable with the Irish, the question introduces considerations beyond the merely historical. There is more at stake than understanding the past – there are the politics of the present to consider as well.

It is my position that these politics must be considered, and rather than somehow introducing a dirty presentism into historical work, represent a responsibility we have as students of the past to recognize the consequences that persist into the present. When we as historians quibble with present day native people – whether they are students in our classes or larger scale organizations for self-determination – about the use of the word genocide, what happens to our interventions? Do they get taken up by some score keeper of precise definitions in the sky?, generating points for the historical profession in ensuring that, for the sake of Truth, no one get access to this word without every box being checked in a (necessarily constructed) definition of the term? And does that help the struggle of native peoples or, make any immediate positive difference in the world?

Or, are there local news stories run about how a teacher in a university is “under attack” for disputing a politically correct talking point, making the rounds on facebook as reactionary and straight up racist statements accumulate in the comments section? Does it instead undermine the attempts of native peoples and their allies to impress upon the current beneficiaries of mass dispossession and oppression that this horrendous crime was not some blip on the historical radar but perpetuated on a massive scale, repeatedly, and underlines all the creature comforts and otherwise we, as the progeny of colonialization, enjoy today? Will it instead be used to weave more stories of “snowflake” social activists that are accused of reading what they want to into history while suicide rates on reservations remain at levels high above the national norm? Will this help to erode the invisibility of native peoples in the white American imagination, or merely provide them another talking point when they insist there is nothing wrong with naming sports teams after racial slurs invented to help normalize the slaughter of their ancestors? And will all this happen regardless of the intentions of the historians or teachers who intervene to quibble with the word “genocide,” even if they would never want to contribute to all of the above?

Obviously, I think it is the latter. And so I stand with those who insist on the use of this word not merely because it is appropriate – which it is – but also because it is a word that makes all of these dodges and denials much more difficult to make. For historical reasons related to the horrors of the twentieth century, genocide has become the word we use to refer to the worst of human crimes. It is the word that, simply by being uttered, indicates that we are dealing with a level of disregard and disrespect for human life that no one should even start to “yes, but” its consequences. What happened to native people in the Americas was a crime of that magnitude, and the wave of its legacy not only continues to this day but has hardly even quieted down to a ripple. Intergenerational trauma and dispossession is right in front of us, continuing to take the lives and the land of indigenous peoples.

It is possible to still not be convinced that genocide is the terminologically correct word. But it is not possible to mount a case for refraining from its use while denying that there are consequences to that restraint that have political outcomes that impact real people, right now. That’s the larger truth we need to impress upon white America – and because political discourse and ideology cares not for the intent of the interlocuter, as scholars and historians with particular power to be heard on these issues, we must be responsible to the reality of that dynamic. Genocide is not only what is was – it is the word that makes it impossible to push any other kind of frame on what it continues to be. Therefore, in this case, it is not only a matter of historical box-checking: it is a question of solidarity.