M.I.A., Zizek, and a Working Definition of Genocide

M.I.A.’s new music video is pretty disturbing. Created for her song “Born Free,” the video shows a near-future Los Angeles (I think), where American soldiers and shock troops are rounding up redheaded, fair-skinned people (or “gingers”), busing them out into the desert, and executing them en masse. (Be warned: the video is very graphic.)

The video is pretty well-done, and properly evocative. But it has one major flaw, in my mind. As the bus carrying the gingers to their doom moves through the streets of Los Angeles, they pass a mural showing a group of gingers dressed in camo, hoisting automatic rifles, under the words, “Our Day Will Come.” A few seconds later, a group of gingers emerges from an alley and starts pelting the bus with stones. They all have their faces covered with kheffiyahs (checkered Arab headdresses). The scene is clearly meant to evoke the Palestinian struggle.

Here’s the fundamental problem: they’re gingers. If you’re covering your face, presumably, you want to keep your identity secret, so they can’t come and find you later. But the premise of the video is that in future dystopian LA, the state is trying to kill all gingers just because they’re gingers. So why do our ginger revolutionaries cover their faces? What’s the point? Palestinians who throw rocks at Israeli tanks cover their faces so the Israel Defense Forces won’t later pick them out from among other Palestinians and arrest them. If the IDF’s policy was to kill all Palestinians anyway, this would be a pointless act.

Last semester, my friend and mentor Robert (the anti-Moderate) introduced me to the neo-Marxist writer Slavoj Zizek. In this interview, Zizek distinguishes between the evil of Joseph Stalin’s purges and the evil of the Holocaust this way:

...there is a basic difference between Stalinist and Nazi victim status, from a simple phenomenological approach. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that’s it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors. ... The idea is that, in a strange way, it admits that you are still a free human being, you had a choice. You are guilty, you have to confess. ...In a totally perverted, thwarted, and twisted way, some margin of human freedom was acknowledged under Stalin.

Zizek’s comments about Nazism bring to mind the words of a three-year-old boy who was killed in the 1994 Rwanda genocide: “Please don’t kill me. I’ll never be Tutsi again.”

There’s an awful lot of debate out there about what does and does not constitute genocide. Obviously, the Holocaust does, as does the mass slaughter of Rwandan Tutsis. But what about the murder of a million Armenians in Turkey during World War I? The Sudanese government’s campaign against the inhabitants of Darfur? Or even, as some historians (whom I would consider nuts, at best, but have a constituency) have suggested, the Israeli occupation of Palestine? The UN’s Genocide Convention defines genocide as an attempt “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Apparently, that definition isn’t clear-cut enough for the times.

This debate is pretty depressing, because it forces scholars to spend lots of thought, ink and breath arguing about whether this and that mass murder is bad enough to qualify for an artificial standard. It turns a black-and-white moral issue into a semantic issue. Nevertheless, if we are to avoid doing violence to the language by using genocide to describe every immoral conflict out there, the debate must be had, and settled.

Perhaps we can posit this as a working genocide litmus test: if the victims’ only crime is being born, into their race, ethnic group, locality, culture, or religion, then it’s genocide. If the victims could save themselves by submitting to their attackers somehow, it’s not.

Cheerful thoughts, eh? The darkness of the human soul...

On that note, if you’re interested in my take on the new Arizona immigration bill, this New Yorker comment sums it up pretty well:

Arizona Leads the Way Backward on Immigration

***

Who is this coming from Edom, from Bozrah, with his garments stained crimson? Who is this, robed in splendor, striding forward in the greatness of his strength?

“It is I, speaking in righteousness, mighty to save.

“I looked, but there was no one to help, I was appalled that no one gave support; so my own arm worked salvation for me, and my own wrath sustained me.”

- Isaiah 63:1, 5