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.

Despite the fundamental nature of these tenants, 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 once more, challenging us to raise a light to it and extinguish the cloak of fear, of deception, of hate. This darkness today can be exemplified by the "global war on terror" – a concerted campaign of subjugation, violence, and murder that seeks nothing less than genocide. As the most recent target of imperialism, 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.

As you read these words now, you may be nodding in affirmation. Sadly, this is hardly a secret. Long before the United States inaugurated the now maligned, yet firmly ongoing Global War on Terror (GWOT), “terrorism” was an effective tool of statecraft.

The end of the Cold War was the start of a new era of total dominance for the United States. Having superseded its ideological counterpoint in Soviet Russia, America emerged victorious in the 20th century’s clash of civilizations with communism. As the sole superpower, a true Pax Americana – the kind President Kennedy envisioned in 1963 – seemed well and truly in our grasp. However, as it turns out, peace is a lousy catalyst for expansion. America needed a new counterpoint against which it could position its global supremacy as at once essential and precarious. Enter the “benevolent hegemony,” an America of ever-growing power and reach with the “task… to preserve an international security environment conducive to American interests and ideals” across the globe. Penned by the architects of the Bush doctrine and stacked with the denizens of his war cabinet, the seminal works presenting this New American Century, as it was dubbed, read like a map of the yet unwaged War on Terror, complete with asymmetric warfare and non-state actors. The only thing missing was an enemy to play the role of a new 21st century clash of civilizations. Exactly a year after its publication, the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 provided just the counterpoint America was seeking for its new century of empire. What transpired since, is 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.

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. Standing on the banks of a threat of such imminence and magnitude is not an easy matter to ponder. Thus, understanding how we got here will help in understanding how we can safely halt the march and never return to its dark path.

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.

Through these shifting global power structures, the traditional imperial model was falling out of favor, as was the shaky peace that ended the war. Germans faced humiliation, while 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, serving as 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 were only too happy to cultivate 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 and furled brows of concern 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.

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. Europe 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” native populous 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 [in the terms of Jonathan Locke] over the always inferior, sometimes exotic, never equal colonial subject: “immature, stagnant, and inherently incapable of progress” [1] who desperately needed the civilized “natural” liberal order. 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-wrought civility. 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'