On November 5, 2024, US voters face a choice between two candidates for President. One is more genocidal than the other, but both have betrayed deep fealty to Israel and total disregard for Palestinian lives.
People scratching their heads over how the ‘world’s greatest democracy’ is backing a genocide in Gaza should take a cue from history: Over the past century, genocides have reaped over one hundred million victims and counting – and Western democracies, self-styled as anti-genocidal, have committed their fair share of mass killing.
Conflating demos and ethnos
Liberal historians tend to view genocides as aberrations inimical to democracy – which they in turn portray as essentially pacific, benevolent, and absolutely antithetical to genocide. They depict genocides as primitive, uncivil, barbaric, essentially anti-modern atrocities carried out by backward and evil political forces.
As Michael Mann, author of The Dark Side of Democracy, sardonically frames their position: ‘Blame the politicians, the sadists, the terrible Serbs (or Croats) or the primitive Hutus (or Tutsis)—for their actions have little to do with us.’
In fact, genocides have occurred hand in glove with the rise of ethnonationalist empires and states – including the United States of America. In some manifestations, genocide has been inherent to the modern nation-state, whose ethnonationalist character, pushed to its limits, necessitates the extermination of ethnic groups that are viewed as impediments to ethnic hegemony within a society determined to preserve its seemingly seamless racial fabric.
Not only are genocides distinctly modern – Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, used it to define ‘an old practice in its modern development’ – but they are often carried out by states that define themselves as democratic.
Genocides have occurred hand in glove with the rise of ethnonationalist empires and states – including the USA
According to Mann, ethnic cleansing committed by democracies ‘result where the demos (democracy) is confused with the ethnos (the ethnic group)… It results from complex interactions among leaders, militants, and core constituencies of ethnonationalism’. One could, for example, readily apply this conflation to the Israeli ethos of ‘Jewish and Democratic’.
This dangerous conflation has resulted in genocidal atrocities from the Native American genocide, to the Holocaust, to the Bosnian Genocide. Between those events, US leaders sought to justify their genocidal acts by appealing to national interests and liberal and democratic ideals.
Footsteps of ‘civilisation’
For US founders and presidents, genocide was in the name of civilisation. Thomas Jefferson – the third US President, who owned over 600 slaves in his lifetime – declared that the ‘barbarities’ of Native peoples ‘justified extermination’. A century later, President Theodore Roosevelt said that ‘extermination was as ultimately beneficial [to Native Americans] as it was inevitable’.
Following in US footsteps, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the principal overseer of Nazi Germany’s genocidal pogroms – recognised and named as such by the United States – declared: ‘It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life’.
Similar justifications have facilitated other genocidal acts carried out or enabled by US military forces, mainly beyond their national boundaries and often in partnership with other Western democracies. Consider the bombing of Dresden, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, napalming the Vietnamese countryside, bombing Cambodia, the US ‘secret’ role in the Rwandan genocide, and now its complicity in Israel’s decimation of Gaza.
These genocidal acts have always been in the name of ‘civilisation’ – from the French Mission Civilisatrice to Netanyahu’s declared ‘clash between barbarism and civilisation’
These acts have always been in the name of ‘civilisation’. Enlightened France massacred over one million Algerians in the name of civilisation – its Mission Civilisatrice gave it a coherent justification of colonial violence and ethnic cleansing for over a century. As Benjamin Netanyahu, a genocidal war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court, declared before a bipartisan meeting of US lawmakers: ‘It’s a clash between barbarism and civilisation’.
The tragic irony is that this worn-out ‘civilising mission’ rationale is now not entirely without truth: these endless appeals to ‘civilisation’ by genocidal regimes affiliated with the ‘civilised’ West have made genocide intrinsic to what we understand as ‘modern civilisation’.
As Mann concludes: ‘murderous ethnic cleansing has been a central problem of our civilisation, our modernity, our conceptions of progress, and our attempts to introduce democracy… murderous ethnic cleansing comes from our civilisation and from people, most of whom have been not unlike ourselves.’
Erasing cultural pluralism
Various historians have traced genocide back to modernisation in Great Britian, or settler colonialism, or the modern state, or nationalism, or the rise of Capitalism. In all these myriad manifestations, genocide has been a deliberate instrument of the nation-state and its desire to create national sovereignty and ethnic homogeneity. It’s been inexorably linked to the notion of ethnos, or people, and often committed in the name of the people, or Volk.
The genocides of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been predicated on perfectly modern myths and mythologies, invented traditions, and dangerous ideologies of race and nationhood. In other words, the modern nation-state’s claims to monopoly over sovereignty, coupled with its terrestrial ambitions, have created the desire to erase the cultural pluralisms of the old empires.
The Armenian genocide was not committed by the dying Ottoman Empire, but the modernist and reformist Young Turks government, which was ethnonationalist in character. Think of Palestine before Zionism – a broad mosaic of Arabs, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Armenians, Circassians, and even Jewish Palestinians. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which Zionist leaders thought necessary, was an integral part and intended outcome of political Zionism’s desire to create a purely Jewish state in Palestine.
Economic power and the will to destroy
History frankly informs us that modern genocide is carried out with modern weapons, and often facilitated by an alliance of democratic administrations, bureaucracies, media, and a complex network of defense industries, Big Tech, corporate and lobbying interests, and money in politics.
It happens when the ethnonationalist state accumulates enough economic and military power to deploy a sudden and overwhelming force against the unwanted ethnic group. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expressed this economic reality when she declared: ‘We can certainly afford to stand with Israel, and to support Israel’s military needs.’
Modern genocide is facilitated by an alliance of democratic administrations, bureaucracies, media, defence industries, Big Tech, corporate and lobbying interests
These factors partly explains why the Biden Administration has been neither willing nor able to stop Israel’s ongoing, year-long genocide in Gaza, which has killed over fifty thousand people, the majority women and children. The United States is complicit in the Gaza genocide not despite its democratic character, but mainly because of it.
As Samantha Power once observed, ‘The United States has never in its history intervened to stop genocide, and has, in fact, rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred’. The US has a dark history of turning a blind eye to genocides, as well as abetting or committing them – from the Holocaust, to Bosnia, to Rwanda.
But its genocidal complicity in Gaza has been the darkest yet – carried out with a strong ‘democratic’, bipartisan mandate, and sustained by brutally suppressing grassroots antiwar movements at home.
As Former British diplomat Craig Murray recently put it: ‘Not only is the West complicit in the Genocide in Palestine, the ruling class of the West is so scared of its own citizens that it is now prepared to persecute its own citizens in support of a genocide.’
Without fundamental reforms of its democratic system and institutions, it’s hard to see how the United States could change course on genocides
