“We’re hardwired for love. We are taught to do violence, and to hate.” — Dana Mashoian Walrath

A couple of months ago in Warsaw, the Polish writer and Jewish activist Konstanty Gebert argued that Gaza wasn’t a genocide. Today’s guest disagrees. In The Book of Genocides, graphic artist and anthropologist Dana Mashoian Walrath draws ten genocides including what she sees as the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.

So what, exactly, is a “genocide”? Walrath’s definition borrows from the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term during the Second World War. Lemkin meant the word to mean the destruction of peoples that had been deemed sub-human. Thus Walrath includes crimes against the First Peoples of the Americas and Black Americans alongside 20th-century mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia, where her ancestors were persecuted.

Some will quibble over this list. Although quibbling over the top (or bottom) ten genocides isn’t exactly good taste. Besides, The Book of Genocides is a poignant work of graphic art in the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And its author, for all her anthropological insights into why people commit crimes against humanity, isn’t shy with her genocide jokes. Springtime for Hitler, anyone?

Five Takeaways

• Always a Land Grab. Ten genocides across five centuries, chosen to expose the patterns: the purpose is always land, the apparatus always dehumanization. Precise definitions, she argues, often serve “to keep some stories out.”

• Lemkin’s Last Train. The man who coined the word: awakened by an Armenian assassin’s trial, escaped a bombed train from Warsaw, died in 1959 penniless — and, she suspects, regretting his refusal to back We Charge Genocide.

• Can You Have Half a Genocide? Andrew’s trivialization pushback drew the hour’s concession: “the absolute spot-on critique.” Her answer: name what’s on its way to massacre early. We’re hardwired for love, taught to hate.

• Stanton’s Stages in MAGA America. Is MAGA rhetoric genocidal? “Absolutely.” Polarization, dehumanization, discrimination — “a heck of a lot” of the ten stages. “Very, very shaky ground.”

• Springtime for Hitler. Maus found her her medium; laughter is respite. Safe to enter, not whitewashed. “The boundaries are all human made, so let’s unmake them.”

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy The Book of Genocides: hup.harvard.edu

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: the G word, from Warsaw to Burlington
00:01:39 Humor, distance, irony: how to draw genocide
00:03:42 Ten genocides — and the fights over the list
00:04:35 Palestine, and Lemkin’s broader definition
00:07:13 Raphael Lemkin: the last train from Warsaw
00:10:55 Is genocide modern? Arendt, Sparta, and the first civilizations
00:13:35 Slavery as genocide: the operational word is systemic
00:14:40 Can you have half a genocide?
00:15:48 Karen and the kids: does the word get trivialized?
00:16:40 We Charge Genocide: Lemkin’s great regret
00:19:42 Art or education? Why Harvard, not Pantheon
00:23:34 Inside the editing: prove the scholar, then make the comic
00:25:48 Taught to hate: Thanksgiving myths and Martin Luther King
00:28:08 Stanton’s stages: is MAGA America on the path?
00:30:54 Homelessness, billionaires, and structures that disenfranchise
00:32:53 Chickens, pigs, and the limits of the word
00:34:43 A book of resistance: Stones from the River and the fearful
00:39:00 Spiegelman, Aliceheimer’s, and laughter as respite
00:41:49 “Do you really want to make it safe?”
00:43:18 Springtime for Hitler: the genocide joke