The planned, organized, and systematic suppression of distinctive cultures aims at annihilating human groups for what makes them what they are. One perpetrator is the People’s Republic of China.
by Marco Respinti
Article 3 of 4. Read article 1 and article 2.
In reference to the two pillars of the architecture of the United Nations (UN) “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” of 1948, since (a) genocides are defined by the intention to target identifiable and identified human groups, and (b) markers are the tools to identify human groups targeted for genocide, we can conclude that (c) culture is undoubtedly an element of objective identification of human groups too, and can serve to ascertain genocidal intentions.
Within the one human family—biology proves its oneness, too—culture is the chief element to distinguish one human group from another. Culture may depend on religion, and is quite often based on it, yet it is not the same as religion. Suffice to say here that religion (or non-religion) is a shaper of culture into a worldview that goes beyond acts of worship and rituals. Thus, the presence of religion in the list of markers in the UN “Convention on Genocide” does not automaticallyabsorb culture.
Culture, incarnated at least in languages, literatures, arts, and artifacts, but also in customs, usages, traditions, and manners, and a variety of other features, is also the seminal ingredient that defines a “nation” as diverse from a “state.” In fact, there have been and there are nations with no state and states embracing more than a single nation. “Nation” is a cultural concept, while “state” is an institutional concept. Culture binds men and women in a deeper way than political and even geographical borders—unless borders are the material expression of the culture of a nation that may have also organized itself in a state, which in this case is the visible manifestation of a national culture.
Table of Contents
The failure of nominalism and positivism
It would be of course preposterous and arrogant to claim that Article 2 of the UN “Convention on Genocide,” which does not mention “culture” as a marker for identifying human groups targeted for genocide, in fact does include culture. It does not. At the same time, it is quite clear that on this subject philology and juridical studies should come together to avoid both nominalism and positivism.
As it is well known, the primary and direct source of the UN “Convention on Genocide,” for both language and substance, is the work of Polish jurist Rafał Lemkin (1900–1959, anglicized as Raphael and also spelled Rafaël), whose 1944 book, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress”, was the quintessential instrument to first internationally acknowledge the new crime of “genocide” and then establish the “Convention.”
Lemkin himself created the word, blending “γένος” (“ghénos”) and “caedo.” The latter is Latin and means “to kill,” while the first is Greek and means “race, people.” It is crucial here to underline that in the English language “race” does not always automatically implies a biological meaning, even less a racist connotation, but is commonly used (or was, before the contemporary sensitiveness on the subject) as a synonym of “group,” “kin,” “kindred,” and even “nation,” i.e., a portion of humanity. The English language even uses “human race” to indicate all human beings, implicitly underlining its oneness and rescuing the word from any possible racist implications. The expression is also used today as a commercial brand with no scandal at all.
This happens because that same non-biological and non-racist meaning is in the Greek “ghénos” as well as in its Latin derivation “gens.” They both convey the meaning of “tribe.” In fact, in ancient Roman culture, a “gens” was a group of families descending from a common ancestor and united by a religious practice substantiated in worships, rites, and rituals. “Gentes” were not groups of people presenting common physical traits.
In footnote 1 of Chapter IX, entitled “Genocide,” of his “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” Lemkin suggests in fact that “another term could be used for the same idea,” namely, “ethnocide,” consisting of the Greek word “ethnos”—nation—and the Latin word “caedo.” So, in Lemkin’s words, “race” means “ethnos,” “έθνος,” which translates the Latin “natio,” “nation.” Suffice to mention that within international law, which regulates relationship among states and establish norms observed by different states, a branch is traditionally called “ius gentium” or, in English, “law of nations” and in French “droit des gens.”
“Genocide” is then the extermination of a portion of humanity no matter the synonyms languages use to define it, provided it is identifiable and identified through one of the markers that make it possible to single out a human group, kin, kindred, nation, tribe, “ethnos” or “gens.”
Nowadays “genocide” is a codified decisive word, also in international law, and of course no one is proposing to change it (there is no reason for this), but it is quite clear that for Lemkin essence, not words, matters. “The practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups […] is called by the author,” Lemkins writes in the Preface of his “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” referring to himself in the third person, “genocide.”
Raphael Lemkin and Gracchus Babeuf
It is noteworthy that another author worked along what appears to be the same line of reasoning around 150 years before Lemkin, coming from a totally different cultural and political perspective. It was French revolutionary journalist François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797), known as “Gracchus” Babeuf, during the French Revolution (1789–1799). He denounced and condemned (curiously on a class war perspective, making him a proto-Communist) the genocide perpetrated in 1793–1794 by the French government against the Catholic inhabitants of the northwest of France. He did it in his 1795 book “Du système de dépopulation ou La vie et les crimes de Carrier.” While the second part of the title refers to French revolutionary politician Jean-Baptiste Carrier (1756–1794), one of the local authorities responsible for the slaughter, the first can be translated as “The System to Achieve Depopulation” or “Systematic Depopulation.” The book, reprinted in modern editions with important commentaries, foreshadows Lemkin’s criteria: the intention of physically annihilating an identifiable and identified human group, clearly stated, and systematically planned and implemented.
Babeuf anticipated Lemkin also in employing a new expression to define a new crime, “depopulation,” which includes the same word used by Lemkin: “people,” i.e., a portion of humanity, or “ethnos,” “gens,” “nation.” Babeuf even used “nationicide” and consecrated the use of “populicide,” turning against the French revolutionary government an accusation that it had cast against King Louis XVI (1754–1793) through the words pronounced in 1792 by French politician Alexandre Deleyre (1726-1797). But Deleyre’s rhetorical and unsubstantiated use lacks Babeuf’s consciousness of the tremendous crime that “Du système de depopulation” uncovers and starts documenting.
Cambodia and Ukraine
What it is clear in Lemkin’ work is the logic that establishes genocide as a new felony differentiating it from war crimes and crimes against humanity. That logic rests on the identifiability of a targeted human group. Identifiability may be a matter of identity or identification. The first is the conception and the conscience that a human group has of itself, while the second is the perception and the theory, or hypothesis, that others have of a human group. A representation of this dichotomy is the difference between an endonym, or the native name of a group of people (or place, language, and so on) and an exonym, the name given to a group of people (or place, language, and so on) by outsiders. Identity and identification may or may not coincide. If they do, a human group is targeted for genocide in name of what objectively makes it that specific human group. When identity and identification do not coincide, victims are targeted for what others only subjectively see in them as a group.
The latter is the case of groups of people targeted for genocide because of ascribed characteristics and features that are or take value in the eyes of the perpetrators only. For example, in Cambodia the Communist regime of the Khmer Rouge committed a genocide that between 1975 and 1979 eliminated up to a quarter of the national population also targeting people that simply wore spectacles or whose hands were “too” clean. They were in fact considered an identifiable class of “enemies of the people” (in the Communist rhetoric) being intellectuals (who read books using glasses) or middle-class citizens (never “dirtying” themselves with manual work).
Another apt example is the Holodomor, the genocide for starvation of over six million people, perpetrated by the Communist regime of Soviet Union in Ukraine in the years 1932–1933. A relevant part of the victims was made of “kulaks,” “кулаки́,” peasants who owned land. Similarly accused of being “enemies of the people,” they were targeted for challenging the collectivistic economic system established and upheld by the regime as the panacea of all evils based on the Marxist-Leninist ideology. The “kulaks” were a real or perceived social class, another entry not listed in the markers of the UN “Convention on Genocide.” Yet, they were a group of human beings that the Soviet regime identified as bearing recognizable characteristics who singled them out and made them eligible for complete destruction.
Cultural genocide
Nowadays, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) a similar fate awaits human groups such as, at least, Tibetans, Mongols, Uyghurs, and other Turkic people in Xinjiang (that its non-Han inhabitants call East Turkestan). Or even Hui Muslims, once hailed as the “good” Muslims loyal to the regime but recognized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as an “ethnic” entity, while they are a religious and cultural group (Han Chinese whose religion is Islam). They are now increasingly attacked in their traditional Muslim lifestyle, culture, and even architecture. And Falun Gong, not an ethnic group either, is targeted for its (religious) culture. This of course extends to all human groups that, bearing a distinctive (religious) culture, become the object of a premeditated attempt at extermination.
In fact, not only the Chinese regime violate those peoples’ right to religious liberty trough a harsh religious persecution, but it also performs the systematic repression and destruction of their language, customs, and folkways, and even art and artifacts, i.e., culture. Those peoples are indeed defined by peculiar cultures. The goal is to render them indistinguishable from others who live within the borders of the PRC and to reach a point when no recognizable Tibetans, Mongols, Uyghurs, Turkic populations, Hui Muslims, Falun Gong practitioners or others will exist as such. That day, the use of those ethnonyms and names for religious and cultural groups will be meaningless. Total Sinicization, i.e., homologation to the ideological standards established by the perpetrators, will be accomplished.
Interfering and stopping the transmission of the characteristics that make those people what they are is a method to target a portion of humanity, or “ethnos,” “gens,” “people,” “nation,” in Babeuf’s and Lemkin’s languages. All this bears important implications on today’s scenarios. They will be discussed in the next and last article of this series.
