Behind the march to genocide

Never Again as a living creed: Extinguishing the Looming Darkness

In the wake of World War II, the symbolic creed of “Never Again” was raised as an ever-present light against the specter of darkness required for evil to flourish. Never Again would we be silent witnesses to atrocity. Never Again would we be agents of murderers and abusers under any pretense. Never Again would we alienate a people so thoroughly to condone wanton transgression against them. Never Again would we propose a construct of supremacy that condemns others to a status of inferiority.

Never Again would we allow genocide on our watch.

In the decades since the phrase first came to evoke such meanings, it seems we have failed to raise this light when darkness encroached. Today, darkness is encroaching again, challenging us to raise a light to it and extinguish its specter of fear, deception, and hate. Cloaked in terms such as the "global war on terror" (GWOT) and "battle against extremism," a concerted campaign of subjugation, violence, and murder is being waged that seeks nothing less than genocide. As the most recent target of imperialist domination, Muslims are the new enemy du jour. Whether in their own countries, as immigrants, or as neighbors, Muslims are being targeted purely on the basis of their faith. The process of alienation, of derision and hate, of wanton transgression, and of accepting these things whether through silence, complacency, or as agents of it ourselves is decades in the making.

Sadly, "terrorism" has long been an effective tool of statecraft, wielded against the colonizer's subjects to carry out horrific transgressions. During the independence wars in Latin America, the term "terrorism" was often used to delegitimize the independence movement and deride those seeking sovereignty and self-determination. It was similarly used in the independence wars in Africa, and in South Africa to advance apartheid and deny the rights and humanity of those refusing it. It still stands as a cornerstone of the justification for the genocide in Palestine. However, the broadly maligned Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) brought a new turn: the commercialization and export of terrorism as a product – packaged and used by democracies and despots alike to justify and legitimize repression wherever it serves the state’s ends. And state's are not the only customer. Increasingly, corporate and business actors are using it too with voices calling for economic and ecological justice and labor equality treated as threats and enemies.

Rooted in Europe’s longstanding enmity of Islam, and fronted by this most recent iteration of imperial expansionism, the GWOT has provided a convenient template for genocidal and supremacist movements and state parties to seek the extermination of minorities and political rivals, defile and dehumanize them, subject them to tyranny and evil, and ultimately commit mass atrocities against them. It is not a template alone, but a means of signaling belonging to the camp of the hegemony, currying favor, or providing cover for competing powers. After all, calling their bluff would risk exposing the absurdity of the entire model. From burning down entire villages with their inhabitants in Myanmar (Burma), to the incineration and extermination of the Uyghurs in China, to the open calls to genocide and mass incitement to violence in India, to the fascist and populist movements spawning across Europe, the cloak of darkness has already taken the lives of untold thousands and scorched the Earth with the same ferocity. But how did we get here?

At the start of the 20th century, the world was restive. Europe’s global colonial dominion – British East Africa, Italian North Africa, French Indo-China, Dutch East Indies, German New Guinea and so on – was in tumult as negotiations amongst themselves broke down at home. The battle between the Great Powers devolved into all-out War.

Across the Atlantic, the United States’ rapid economic growth boosted its military one, and its victory over the last vestiges of Spain’s empire had given it newfound power to apply the Monroe Doctrine, manifesting its hemispheric dominion as the European empire’s equal, and moving farther afield with its capture of the Philippines. Over a period of just four years, World War I took the lives of millions (estimates are between 6 and 10 million), plunging more than a quarter of global citizens into war. Humanity was not the only victim. The war wreaked ecological havoc. Millions of acres of land were scorched and destroyed, causing the collapse of entire ecosystems and pushing some species to the brink of extinction.

Through these shifting global power structures, the traditional imperial model was falling out of favor, as was the shaky peace that ended the war. While Germany faced humiliation, France and Britain never reckoned with their own crimes and misadventures. Instead, the new imperial iteration was taking shape with them firmly at its helm, led by an emergent global power – the United States – which fronted the United Nations’ predecessor, the League of Nations. This was the initial foundation of the future liberal rules-based order.

Similar to today, the specter of a burgeoning globalist bloc fueled a wave of nationalism, fascism, and populism across Europe, kindled by the hateful, exclusionary, and ethnic supremacy doctrines that the Great Powers cultivated against their preferred "Others." Thus was the march to genocide.

Decades of targeted vilification, caricatures, labeling, stereotyping, and scapegoating, backed in law and in fact by a brutal hierarchy of humanness – by which it was determined who deserved inclusion in the liberal universalist order and who did not. The first vestiges of this nascent order are well-represented by the infamous Evian Conference of July 1938, where the world’s Great Powers gathered in a French resort town to exchange platitudes over the “Jewish Question,” a question of Europe’s own refugees, collectively deemed undesirable on the basis of faith or ethnicity and expelled from their homes. And who stepped up? The tiny island nations of The Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Despite being condemned as a shameful stain, the same scene has played out countless times in the decades since with, every Western-led war or conflict and its consequences mostly legitimized, often deflected, occasionally deliberated, and always proceeding with ghastly consequences. The global conscience may vent to no avail. Thus was the march to genocide.

Of course, this is hardly by accident. The West had long reveled in a self-indulgent view of ethno-superiority that lurched through messianic crusades and then secular “enlightenment,” conceptualized as a divine mandate to claim the lands of the subhuman and the “primitive” indigenous populations or as an altruistic mission civilisatrice (“civilizing mission”) to rescue those same colonized peoples from themselves, immortalized in Rudyard Kipling’s “White man’s burden.”

With the collapse of Europe’s old order, this mandate of heaven gave way to a mandate of reason, shifting from papal edict to philosophical tutelage over the never equal colonial subject. As the self-appointed center of civilization, and its bearer and ultimate enforcer, Western Europe – primarily France and Britain in this iteration – committed massive, unspeakable atrocities across their imperial domain in the name of civilizing, modernizing, and uplifting the “Others” that had yet to acculturate to this newly-branded machete-driven civility. As one historian observed: "the ideology of empire was hardly ever a brute jingoism; rather, it made subtle use of reason and recruited science and history to serve its ends" [1]. Such language is essential to every imperial project, to dehumanizing people as inferior degenerates whose extermination is thus easy and even inevitable, and equally essential to the agents of genocide who can see themselves not as the savages, thieves, and conspirators they accuse others of being, but as saviors and, in modern parlance, bearers of freedom. Thus has always been the road to genocide.

From the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the 16th and 17th century that openly sought the annihilation of Muslims, to the French and British conquests of the 18th and 19th centuries that terrorized innumerable communities and nations murdering and subjugating millions of indigenous peoples, to America’s modern-day mission civilisatrice in the name of freedom or as a war on terror, the colonial project has proceeded with remarkably similar rhetoric and philosophy to justify land grabs and dispossession, resource theft, exploitation, racial/ethnic domination, and massive wealth transfer to this day.

Today, these crimes are unfolding before our very eyes in many corners of the globe. Reckoning with the past allows us to understand and translate the meaning of these acts to stop them in the present.

While seemingly daunting, the triumph against the march to genocide is that it can be stopped. This is the guiding principle of Never Again.

Not abstracted conceptions of morality, but real, persistent, and brave work happening all around us, all around the globe, that has thus far stymied an even more rapid descent toward a modern-day holocaust. Stopping this march is not an act of charity towards “others” it is a requirement of our humanity and a bulwark against becoming victims ourselves, whoever “us” may be. Our very humanity is compromised by the dehumanization of others.

Join us in raising a light to the darkness and illuminating the world against evil. Never Again! Whoever be the perpetrator, whoever be the victim, wherever the darkness, whatever the cloak.

Explore Further

Redefining Genocide: Settler colonialism, social death, and ecocide

The War on Terror and the Crisis of Postcoloniality in Africa

Beyond the 'War on Terror': Hegemony, Violence, and the 'Global Democratic Revolution'