genocide - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

to the victor

Everyone knows that history is written by the victors, but I’m not sure it’s always realised – or I should say that I hadn’t considered – how much of a privilege that is. Of course there are the obvious material, societal privileges that come with winning, but I’m thinking specifically about history and the way it’s transmitted.

This little epiphany came while watching the now ten-year-old show, Tony Robinson’s Wild West. It’s not a piece of history that generally interests me, but Robinson belongs to the last generation that grew up with ‘cowboys and Indians’ occupying a major place in popular culture but is also a presenter who tends to look at history from a point of view that conservative critics would call postmodern; i.e. he tends to think that history is complicated and acknowledges injustices, calls exploitation exploitation and that kind of thing, and so it piqued my interest. But one of the unexpected consequences of making an enlightened history show is the focus it places on experts and the way that they come across.

Ancient Greek red-figure pottery c.480 BC

Now, I don’t mean to condemn the historians I’m talking about here; most historians are in some ways at least enthusiasts for their subject, and the best ones have a special, and sometimes quite a nerdy, bond with the period and people that they have chosen to study. When I studied ancient history, one of the best lecturers I had was a specialist on ancient Greece who had seemingly based his physical appearance on the look of Greek men on ancient red-figure pottery; curly hair, big beard and all. And there was a historian of Rome in my Classical Studies course with a ‘Julius Caesar’ haircut. And it feels natural that someone would want to immerse themselves in the civilisation which fascinates them enough to make it their life’s work.

Joe LeFors – lawman & fashion role model

And so it makes sense that some of the historians in Tony Robinson’s Wild West, with their (to British eyes) Edwardian moustaches and waistcoats should look as though they are tending the bar in a saloon in Calamity Jane, or are speaking to the camera from the frontier, while wearing their fringed buckskin jackets. It’s kind of comical, but also isn’t, in the context of that history. The clothes seem like a concession to the romanticism of the Old West, but these are modern historians, and despite being occasionally slightly squeamish about the history they are recounting, and tending to overstate the balance of power in the ‘Indian wars’ they make no serious attempt to whitewash it.

But it feels significant that the Lakota historian talking about the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 wasn’t wearing historical fancy dress, and it would seem strange if he was. And it’s the discussion of atrocities like Wounded Knee which, to paraphrase that historian, is framed as a war crime, because that feels historically, appropriate but in fact there was no war – it was just a crime, albeit one committed by a government. And nakedly genocidal attitudes at the time, encapsulated by a quotes from L. Frank Baum, author of – of all things – the Wizard of Oz and its sequels, make the buckskins, waistcoats and archaic facial hair and fashions of the Western historians seem somewhat incongruous.

Bartender at the Toll Gate Saloon in Black Hawk, Colorado c.1897

Hearing of the death of Sitting Bull in the aftermath of Wounded Knee, Baum wrote in his popular newspaper:

The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.

Though thankfully not, or not quite, enacted, this wasn’t a controversial view at the time. But with even with a little knowledge of the historical context (there had been a government policy explicitly called the Indian Removal Act only 50 years earlier), its knowing blatancy is shocking. It’s one thing to talk or read about massacres of Greeks or Spartans or Persians thousands of years ago; it’s quite another to think of it happening in the time of your own great-grandparents, or to think of it happening elsewhere literally as I write these words.

It’s an obvious, problematic and quite cheesy comparison to make, but I’ll make it. A situation where a historian could sit in a black shirt and swastika armband, talking about World War Two – acknowledging quite reasonably the terrible things that were done on both sides, but talking, in an essentially neutral way about the formation of modern Europe, while a far more sombre Jewish historian shows us the Auschwitz museum, is almost unimaginable. And yet – judging by the way these things actually work – it’s not an especially outlandish alternate present.

the Emperor Augustus, statue from the 1st century AD with eternally modern hair

Not only is history written by the victors, but the world we live in is forged by them, and generations on from winning an overwhelming victory they are no longer ‘they,’ they are just us. But that takes time. The historian who loves ancient Greece can afford love it, wherever they come from. Greece was barbaric as well as enlightened, Greece had slaves and was misogynistic – but Greece is only what we call it now for convenience; the collection of independent city states and relatively heterogynous cultures now called ‘ancient Greece’ is not the same as the country Greece. “Rome” is not Italy. The world – especially but not exclusively the western world – has benefitted from ancient Greek and Roman culture and though it’s easy to argue for its negative influence too, that’s less the fault of those ancient people than it is our more recent ancestors who understood those cultures in the way they could and wanted to understand them.

Regarding America, and Britain and everywhere else, all of that may come, in a thousand years or so, when the state of the world will probably be as unimaginable to us now as the internet would be to Herodotus. But. There are photographs of the mass graves being dug at Wounded Knee and while the winners of the ‘Indian wars’ were able to impress their culture on the country and to define that recent history in terms of expansion, exploration and consolidation, the other side of the story is still living history too. And the losers get to just live with it and tell their stories to whoever will listen.

It’s fair to say that the nature of the conquest of America – not just the 1800s and the Old West, but everything from the founding of the first colonies to the establishment and erosion of the reservations – has never been forgotten, but it’s only relatively recently that it’s been publicly acknowledged. Tony Robinson’s television show came about precisely because he belongs to a generation – my father’s generation – where young boys were entertained by stories of heroic cowboys fighting savage Indians in a way that now looks, despite the inevitable messiness of history as opposed to fiction, like an almost perfect inversion of the facts. And I belong to one of the first generations where it hasn’t been popularly presented that way. It’s never too soon to be passionate about history or to tell the truth about it, but even though it’s always nice to find yourself on the winning team, when that happens it’s probably worth considering what it really means and how you got there. And if the dressing up still feels appropriate then go for it.

notes in may

May-appropriate art: William Roberts – Bank Holiday in the Park (1923)

This is just what it says*: I intend to post something at least once a month but in lieu of any finished articles, here are various notes I made during May that never got developed into anything more substantial, some of which will probably seem mysterious later since I don’t think I’ll bother to explain the context.

*tragically, that title is a kind of pun though

“Let them eat space travel”

Publishing light-hearted articles that debate whether AI deserves “human rights,” while not covering the erosion of actual human rights because you don’t want to be ‘political’ is political.

The pressure to make politicians and news agencies use the word “genocide” to describe the Israeli government’s attacks on Gaza are understandable (because they are committing genocide, by the normal definition of the word: the crime of intentionally destroying part or all of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, by killing people or by other methods Cambridge Dictionary) but it’s also kind of self defeating. The focus on a word that represents their actions, rather than the actions themselves creates an instant response which, given the nature of genocide, should be horror, but is more often dismissal; “Genocide? Oh, you’re one of those ‘Free Palestine’ people.” A more important question to ask politicians and the media is possibly, if what is being done to the people of Gaza isn’t genocide, is it therefore somehow okay? Would any non-psychopath presented with an estimated death toll as high as 62,000 Palestinian people since October 7th 2023 think “oh well, it’s a lot but at least it isn’t genocide“? The word is important for moral, legal and factual reasons but at this point it seems as likely to distract from the reality that we are seeing every day, rather than to really bring it home.

Even if the climate emergency is allowed to escalate with no serious attempt to alter it for another decade (which would be, or just as likely, will be, disastrous), it would still be infinitely easier to prevent the Earth from becoming an uninhabitable and Mars-like wasteland than it would to make Mars into a habitable and Earth-like home – especially for any meaningful number of people. Those who are most determined that colonising Mars is a good idea are essentially not serious people, or at least are not serious about the future of mankind. ‘Conquering new worlds’ is just a fun, romantic and escapist idea that appeals more than looking after the world we have; it’s a typical expression of the political right’s obsession with the welfare of imaginary future people as opposed to the welfare of actual human beings who exist.

Just MIT confirming that the problem with solar energy is there’s not enough profit in it

It’s becoming ever more obvious that the UK has a media problem. For a decade now, a particular politician (don’t even want to type his name) with a consistent track record of being unpopular and not winning elections – not, so far coming third or even fourth in a general election – has been foisted on the public to the point where he’s an inescapable presence in British culture. He’s on TV, in newspapers and online on all of the major news outlets, far more than the leader of the official opposition, let alone the leaders of the third and fourth largest parties in the country. By this point, this obsession has seriously started to shape public discourse. It’s fuelled essentially by fact that the small group of very wealthy people in charge of the traditional media are his peers – they support him and his views because they belong to the same millionaire class and milieu. This was the group that made Brexit happen, portraying it as a movement of ‘the people’ when the real impetus for it was the fact that the EU was closing tax loopholes for the millionaire class.

We are now in the Stalinist phase of Brexit (a funny idea, since its adherents are virulently anti-communist) where the only people who have benefitted from Brexit and continue to benefit from it are that ruling class (who still don’t want to pay taxes). As ‘the people’ inevitably fall out of love with Brexit, since it’s damaged the economy, made foreign holidays more difficult and expensive and basically failed to provide any material gains, let alone a raise in the standard of living in the UK, the Brexit ideology becomes stronger and more corrosive, emotive and unhinged. Basically, the media can’t make people satisfied with having less. but it can try to make them angry, and to direct their anger.

The media’s obsession with the views of the man who has become the figurehead for Brexit distracts from the actual views of the public, but naturally it affects them too. Not surprisingly, constant positive coverage of the man and his colleagues has made he and his party more successful – but, after a decade not much more successful, really, given how inescapable his presence has become. But every little increase in popularity is fed into the circular narrative and framed as an unstoppable rise, as if that rise wasn’t essentially being created by those reporting on it. But really, as with Brexit itself, it’s mostly about money.

All of which raises questions; firstly and most importantly, what can be done about it? The readership of even the most popular newspapers isn’t especially big now, but those newspapers are also major presences on social media and on TV. Most importantly (and quite bizarrely, when you think about it) the major broadcasters in TV in the UK still look to newspapers to gauge the political zeitgeist, rather than the other way around (or rather than both TV and newspapers looking to the internet, which would be more accurate but probably not better). The obvious response is to boycott the newspapers and/or TV, but for as long as Parliament still looks to the press barons to find out the mood of the public, that can only remove the governing of the country even further from the lives and opinions of the people. A more positive answer would be to promote alternative politics through what media is available; but again that can only work up to a point, because if politicians are still in thrall to the same old newspapers and broadcasters then, again, Parliament becomes even more of a closed-off, cannibalistic circuit, isolated from popular opinion except when a general election comes around.

Complaining to one’s MP is probably the most sensible thing to do, but unless they happen to be one of the five MPs currently representing the media’s chosen party in Parliament, then they almost certainly agree with you and don’t know what to do about it either. And yet surely it can’t be an insurmountable problem?

A less important, but more heart-breaking question is a hypothetical one; what would the country be like now if the media was obsessed with a party with a progressive political agenda (the Green Party for instance, are actually more popular than ever, and despite a few cranks and weirdos, mostly a positive force)? What if, instead of spending a decade spreading intolerance, division, hatred, racism etc so that a few millionaire businessmen could pay less tax, they had been had been pushing ideas of equality and environmentalism into the culture? Money is at the heart of it all really, and this frustrating situation actually led to me taking the unusual (for me) and pointless step of writing an email to the Prime Minister that he will never have read, part of which said;

Surely one of the most effective way to neutralise the poisonous rhetoric of the far right is not to pursue its populist talking points, but to materially improve the lives of the people of the UK? In the last general election – less than a year ago – a vote for Labour was for most people a vote for change, not for more of the same. If Britain wanted divisive rhetoric, attacking migrants and minorities, there were far more obvious people to vote for.

So anyway; hopefully June is better.

a simple question about dead children

It’s forever being explained that this or that war or ‘conflict’ (a fun word to watch out for which generally means that the authorities and media recognise something shameful or unequal in the situation) is complex and difficult. But although the historical backgrounds, causes and contexts of wars are almost always complex, there’s one simple question that can clarify the course of events as they unfold: Is it ever acceptable to kill unarmed civilians who aren’t attacking you? If the answer is anything that essentially means yes, then the argument is ended and an eternal cycle of violence, death, reprisals and resentments is tacitly accepted. But if the answer is no – and to me it definitely is – then there’s a moral imperative not to let it happen.

Jean Colombe – Richard I of England orders the Massacre of the Saracen Prisoners, 1191 (painted 1474-5)

The part of the question that states who aren’t attacking you is crucial because realistically, escalating violence frequently ends in killing, whether or not that’s the original intention. Unless one is a Gandhi-style pacifist who thinks that being attacked is a signal to lie down and take it and that (to cite examples he used) the UK should have let Nazi Germany invade unopposed or that the Jews should have willingly delivered themselves up for extinction, the idea of being attacked and not reacting feels entirely unnatural, a practical impossibility, whatever your personal philosophy is. Not that that is any defence against most of the kind of attacks that happen in modern warfare.

Francisco de Goya – The Third of May 1808 (painted 1814)

Even as someone who believes it’s always wrong to kill unarmed civilians, it’s hard to resist applying that belief hypothetically to historical situations. It’s a pointless exercise though, because while it’s entertaining to imagine ‘sliding doors’ moments in history and extrapolate possible consequences from them, there’s no way of actually knowing how things would have panned out whatever the probabilities seem to have been. Plus, it can’t be changed now anyway. We don’t live in history, yet. ‘What if’ is an irrelevant and frivolous question when applied to history, unless you happen to be writing a novel, making a film or inventing a time machine, but it’s a fundamental question about what is going to happen today.

David Olère – The Massacre of the Innocents (1950s?)

It might seem obvious which war or conflict I have in mind while writing this, but although the most obvious guess is probably the right one, I’m not avoiding naming names out of some kind of misguided sense of neutrality. I’m not trying to downplay sickening atrocities or genocides or to pretend that war crimes only matter when some people commit them but not others. The simplicity and universal applicability of the question is the whole point. Is it ever acceptable to kill unarmed civilians who aren’t currently attacking you? I don’t think so. Everything is irrevocable once it has happened, but nothing is until then, so let’s not act as though some people are just destined to be collateral damage in wars as if it’s a fact of nature rather than the result of human choices and actions.

an alan smithee war

an annoying but perhaps necessary note; “Alan (or Allan, or Allen) Smithee” is a pseudonym used by Hollywood film directors when they wish to disown a project

Watch out, this starts off being insultingly elementary, but then gets complicated and probably contradictory, quite quickly.

Countries, States and religions are not monoliths and nor are they sentient. They don’t have feelings, aims, motivations or opinions. So whatever is happening in the Middle East isn’t ‘Judaism versus Islam’ or even ‘Israel versus Palestine’, any more than “the Troubles”* were/are ‘Protestantism versus Catholicism’ or ‘Britain versus Ireland’.

* a euphemism, which, like most names for these things is partly a method of avoiding blame – as we’ll see

Places and atrocities aren’t monoliths either; Srebrenica didn’t massacre anybody**, the Falkland islands didn’t have a conflict, ‘the Gulf’ didn’t have any wars and neither did Vietnam or Korea. But somebody did. As with Kiefer Sutherland and Woman Wanted in 1999 or Michael Gottlieb and The Shrimp on the Barbie in 1990 and whoever it was that directed Gypsy Angels in 1980, nobody wants to claim these wars afterwards. But while these directors have the handy pseudonym Allan Smithee to use, there is no warmongering equivalent, and so what we get is geography, or flatly descriptive terms like ‘World War One’, which divert the focus from the aggressor(s) and only the occasional exception (The American War of Independence) that even references the real point of the war. But, whether interfered with by the studio or not, Kevin Yagher did direct Hellraiser: Bloodline, just as certain individuals really are responsible for actions which are killing human beings as you read this. Language and the academic study of history will probably help to keep their names quiet as events turn from current affairs and into history. Often this evasion happens for purely utilitarian reasons, perhaps even unknowingly, but sometimes it is more sinister.

** see?

As the 60s drew to its messy end, the great Terry “Geezer” Butler wrote lines which, despite the unfortunate repeat/rhyme in the first lines, have a Blakean power and truth:

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses

Black Sabbath, War Pigs, 1970

There is something sinister and even uncanny in the workings of power, in the distance between avowed and the underlying motivations behind military action. Power politics feels like it is – possibly because intuitively it seems like it should be – cold and logical, rather than human and emotional. It doesn’t take much consideration though to realise that even beneath the chilly, calculated actions of power blocs there are weird and strangely random human desires and opinions, often tied in with personal prestige, which somehow seems to that person to be more important than not killing people or not having people killed.

Anyway, Geezer went on to say:

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor

Still Black Sabbath, War Pigs (1970)

And that’s right too; but does that mean Butler’s ‘poor’ should take no responsibility at all for their actions? In the largest sense they are not to blame for war or at least for the outbreak of war; and conscripts and draftees are clearly a different class again from those who choose to “go out to fight.” But. As so often WW2 is perhaps the most extreme and therefore the easiest place to find examples; whatever his orders or reasons, the Nazi soldier (and there were lots of them) who shot a child and threw them in a pit, actually did shoot a child and throw them in a pit. His immediate superior may have done so too, but not to that particular child. And neither did Himmler or Adolf Hitler. Personal responsibility is an important thing, but responsibility, especially in war, isn’t just one act and one person. Between the originator and the architects of The Final Solution and the shooter of that one individual child there is a chain of people, any one of whom could have disrupted that chain and even if only to a tiny degree, affected the outcome. And that tiny degree may have meant that that child, that human being, lived or died. A small thing in a death toll of something over 6 million people; unless you happen to be that person, or related to that person.

As with the naming of wars and atrocities, terms like “genocide” and “the Holocaust” are useful, especially if we want – as we clearly do – to have some kind of coherent, understandable narrative that can be taught and remembered as history. But in their grim way, these are still euphemisms. The term ‘the Holocaust’ memorialises the countless – actually not countless, but still, nearly 80 years later, being counted – victims of the Nazis’ programme of extermination. But the term also makes the Holocaust sound like an event, rather than a process spread out over the best part of a decade, requiring the participation of probably thousands of people who exercised – not without some form of coercion perhaps, but still – their free will in that participation. The Jewish scholar Hillel the Elder’s famous saying, whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world is hard to argue with, insofar as the world only exists for us within our perceptions. Even the knowledge that it is a spinning lump of inorganic and organic matter in space, and that other people populate it who might see it differently only exists in our perceptions. Or at least try to prove otherwise. And so the converse of Hillel’s saying – which is actually included in it but far less often quoted – is Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. Which sounds like an argument for pacifism, but while pacifism is entirely viable and valuable on an individual basis as an exercise of one’s free will* – and on occasion has a real positive effect – one-sided pacifism relies on its opponents not taking a cynically Darwinian approach, which is hopeful at best. Pacifism can only really work if everyone is a pacifist, and everyone isn’t a pacifist.

*the lone pacifist can at least say, ‘these terrible things happened, but I took no part in them’, which is something, especially if they used what peaceful means they could to prevent those terrible things and didn’t unwittingly contribute to the sum total of suffering; but those are murky waters to wade in.

But complicated though it all is, people are to blame for things that happen. Just who to blame is more complicated – more complicated at least than the workable study of history can afford to admit. While countries and religions are useful as misleading, straw man scapegoats, even the more manageable unit of a government is, on close examination, surprisingly hard to pin down. Whereas (the eternally handy example of) Hitler’s Nazi Party or Stalin’s Council of People’s Commissars routinely purged heretics, non-believers and dissidents, thus acting as a genuine, effective focus for their ideologies and therefore for blame and responsibility, most political parties allow for a certain amount of debate and flexibility and therefore blame-deniability. Regardless, when a party delivers a policy, every member of that party is responsible for it, or should publicly recuse themselves from it if they aren’t.

The great (indeed Sensational) Scottish singer Alex Harvey said a lot of perceptive things, not least and “[Something] I learned from studying history. Nobody ever won a war. A hundred thousand dead at Waterloo*. No glory in that. Nobody needs that.” Nobody ever won a war; but plenty of people, on both sides of every conflict, have lost one – and, as the simple existence of a second world war attests, many, many people have lost a peace too.

*Modern estimates put it at ‘only’ 11,000 plus another 40,000 or so casualties; but his point stands

But the “causes” of war are at once easily traced and extremely slippery. Actions like the 1939 invasion of Poland by the armies of Germany and the USSR were, as military actions still are, the will of certain individuals, agreed to by other individuals and then acted upon accordingly. You may or may not agree with the actions of your government or the leaders of your faith. You may even have had some say in them, but in most cases you probably haven’t. Some of those dead on the fields of Waterloo were no doubt enthusiastic about their cause, some probably less so. But very few would have had much say in the decisions which took them to Belgium in the first place.

The buck should stop with every person responsible for wars, crimes, atrocities; but just because that’s obviously impossible to record – and even if it wasn’t, too complex to write in a simple narrative – that doesn’t mean the buck should simply not stop anywhere. Victory being written by the winners often means that guilt is assigned to the losers, but even when that seems fair enough (there really wouldn’t have been a World War Two without Hitler) it’s a simplification (there wouldn’t have been an effective Hitler without the assistance of German industrialists) and a one-sided one (it was a World War because most of the leading participants had already had unprovoked wars of conquest). That was a long sentence. But, does the disgusting history of Western colonialism, the arguably shameful treatment of Germany by the Allies after WW1 and the dubious nature of the allies and some of their actions make Hitler himself any less personally responsible for the war? And does Hitler’s own guilt make the soldier who shoots a child or unarmed adult civilians, or the airman who drops bombs on them any less responsible for their own actions?

Again; only human beings do these things, so the least we can do is not act like they are some kind of unfathomable act of nature when we discuss them or name them. Here’s Alex Harvey again; “Whether you like it or not, anybody who’s involved in rock and roll is involved in politics. Anything that involves a big crowd of people listening to what you say is politics.” If rock and roll is politics, then actual politics is politics squared; and for as long as we settle, however grudgingly or complacently, for pyramidal power structures for our societies then the person at the top of that pyramid, enjoying its vistas and rarefied air should be the one to bear its most sombre responsibilities. But all who enable the pyramid to remain standing should accept their share of it too.

So when you’re helplessly watching something that seems like an unbelievable waste of people’s lives and abilities, pay close attention to who’s doing and saying what, even if you don’t want to, because the credits at the end probably won’t tell you who’s really responsible.