Goldhagen Solves Genocide in Twelve Pages

In the world of academic smack-downs, the backlash against the positions of Holocaust scholar Daniel Goldhagen is one for the books. Goldhagen became widely-discredited in many circles for the monocausal thesis of his book on German participation in Nazi crimes.

The King of Over-Simplification is back, with an article in The New Republic written with the same arrogance of tomes-past, as if bringing the shining beacon of enlightenment to the ignorant masses. Which might be nice, if Goldhagen had offered anything other than a regurgitation of basic genocide scholarship.

His premise that genocide is "poorly understood" blatantly disregards an entire economy of academic and policy-oriented research on the subject; modern genocides from Armenia to Darfur have been repeatedly scrutinized by a diverse field that grew out of Holocaust studies after World War II. What Goldhagen offers for our education -- genocide is not an unusual event but political tool of modern states, that it seeks to eliminate groups of people as a means to consolidate power, etc etc -- is nothing that wasn't covered in my Genocide 101 class in junior high school.

His solutions -- "prevention, intervention, and punishment" -- follow in the same suit, and, frankly, seem stolen straight from the Enough Project, though with a few trades in jargon to feign the appearance of originality. Not only are his recommendations for "creating conditions" that make genocidal policies unattractive to potential mass murder nothing new, they fail to dig deeper than the level of broad platitudes to the complicated challenges of implementing an international anti-genocide regime -- challenges which Goldhagen's fellow scholars and policy wonks have been debating for years, but with far greater nuance.

The failure of genocide prevention is not due to any lack of problem identification, but to a combination of weak political will and the fact that any sort international intervention does not occur in isolation. Military intervention in Darfur, for instance, could have ripple effects that would damage any number of sensitive political concerns in Africa and the Arab World, including Israel and Palestine. Lives are at stake there, too. The United States cannot simply lead the Western powers in an international force for good, as Goldhagen suggests, as if there would be no other consequences besides triumph over mass murder.

And, good luck getting the US to "guarantee" to bomb anyone who commits or threatens to commit genocide. It might be a nice thought, but it's not always a realistic one. Assuming that putting bounties on the heads of indicted war criminals and threatening military intervention against violent regimes will solve the world's nastiest problem undercuts Goldhagen's own presumption that he understands the nature of genocide better than anyone else. Nothing is that uncomplicated.

[Photo of Rwandan genocide victims from mrflip's Flickr stream, Creative Commons License.]