The warring logics of genocide

Edith Wyschogrod

pp. 207-219

in: John K. Roth (ed), Genocide and human rights, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstrakt

The very mention of genocide usually elicits a shudder, a frisson of horror, psychological revulsion, and moral outrage. Images of mass annihilation, of the dead and dying, evoked by that term are especially troubling since genocidal killing, now endemic in the postmodern world, is grasped as a slaughter of the innocents. It is understood that those earmarked for destruction are selected on the basis of criteria that lie outside the standard rules of conduct in war, even if genocidal events occur in the context of what is designated conventionally as war. Genocidal killing is often justified by its perpetrators not principally on the grounds of what the dead are presumed to have done but rather as required by an ontological flaw, as it were, attributed to the victims.