Over the last year and a half, the US left in particular has made a fetish of genocide, partly for reasons that are both painfully real — the Netanyahu regime’s cynical, systematic, and indiscriminate annihilation of an entire region and all the people in it — and partly for imaginary, related to the evolution of leftism in the US, which in some ways increasingly feels like a sort of counter-MAGA. The basic point is that, like every other word in the world, genocide has different meanings and different ways of meaning, which depend on context at every scale, from the personal histories of those speaking and listening to international legal structures and processes. It’s my sense that the debates that have attended this tend to oscillate between three ways of talking about genocide: (1) legal definitions, (2) common-sense observations, and (3) emotional accusations. But there are other ways of talking about genocide that I think have gotten lost in the shuffle: (4) historical associations and (5) underlying logic.
Historical associations: Israel’s origins lie, in part, in the simple fact that the Nazis — actual WW2-era Germans, their sympathizers, and (if you’ve actually read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem you’ll know this) the disparate ways their various allies navigated and negotiated the Nazis’ obsession with the complete annihilation of Judaism as such. For those related to, or descended from, the survivors of that nightmare, “genocide” has a specific, often very intimate historical meaning. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (irony intended) to understand that accusing those people or some subset of them of genocide is, as they say, personal. True or false, right or wrong, it’s also deeply hurtful — and, ironically, in ways that lie at the very heart of New Leftism’s insights (“the personal is political,” “everything is political,” etc). In purely practical terms, insulting people from the get-go is not a winning persuasive strategy.
This is all a wind-up for the one I’m after here, (5), underlying logic. By that I mean something like Mein Kampf, Hitler’s half-biography, half-manifesto, which he published in the mid-1920s, long before he had the opportunity to implement his “vision.” To my understanding, it isn’t clear when exactly Hitler realized he could concretely set about annihilating Judaism, but it seems to have taken nearly a decade. In that sense, we can say that the underlying logic of the Shoah played out during that period. The development of the post-WW2 international legal order largely aimed at preventing another “great” war; but that was just one register where those aims played out. The understandable — and morally right — aim of ensuring that it would “never again” happen became one of the pillars of postwar cultural development.
Those of you who pay attention to anything I say — a few dozen people at most — may know about my perverse fascination with “Godwin’s Law.” It’s my view that it was immensely destructive, because it gave people a generic, often false, and math-sounding way to wave away the recognition that quite a few people, in everyday contexts, revealed subtle signs that their thinking was tacitly fascist-adjacent or even -sympathetic. And, lo and behold, in the past decade or so, it’s turned out — to the horror of many — that yes indeed, there really are fascists and even nazis everywhere. I’ll leave it to others to debate how many there are, how virulent they are, and all the rest, but the short version is there are a lot of them scattered across the US political spectrum — mostly on what in US terms we’d regard as the right-wing. Mostly.
This is cause for real concern because many people fear — correctly, I think — that the US is at risk of doing what Germany did in the lead-up to WW2: realizing the underlying logic of genocide. This is where it starts to get complicated, meta-complicated, and meta-meta-complicated, with accusations and counter-accusations about genocide in various stages of realization. Some argue that Israel is currently engaged in genocide; others see that description or accusation as a step in a very different genocidal project — the restoration of fascist or even nazi project, in the US in particular.
That brings us to Trump. During his first term, I routinely argued that his beliefs and actions were genocidal in their underlying logic. His dog’s breakfast of racist ideology, his 1970s-style libertine and libertarian “jokes” about caricatured “Jews,” and above all his impulse to politicize public-health policies — notably, his exploitation of Covid-related resources — all made it all too clear that he was perfectly willing to kill vast numbers of people in order to achieve his dreams of revanchist power. More than that, he was eager to do, because in his lizard-brain views the power to commit murder en masse was the hallmark of a Great Man.
In my view, that is one of the key frame we should use to understand his “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which will kick tens of millions of people off even the lowest rungs of the US health-care system. Yes it realizes decades-old rightist resentments against social-welfare programs, and yes it’s an integral part of his oligarchist dream of capturing as much wealth as possible regardless of the collective price the world will pay, and yes to a bunch of other nefarious projects. But current liberal discourse always reverts to describing things in terms of negation: unfair, unequal, incoherent, unsustainable, uneducated, insane, and so on. But all those descriptions fail in one key way: what they don’t do is clearly and affirmatively describe Trump’s aim of killing vast numbers of people as proof of his “greatness.”