Jonathan Kay: The politics of genocide

Jonathan Kay on genocides and the related policies and controversies.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance refers to the Holocaust as “unprecedented” in its thoroughness and industrial approach, but that human suffering and killing is universal, whatever the specifics of the genocide or atrocity. Kay is on the same page; Yad Vashem sessions focus on the stories of individual lives, not just the horror of the numbers:

And herein lies the great paradox of memorializing genocides qua genocides: The whole exercise always is cast as one conducted for the victims and their suffering. Yet by agonizing and fighting over the semantics of genocide, we systematically ignore the way these victims actually die: as individuals full of individual grief and pain and love and loss. Everything else is arid semantics.

Jonathan Kay: The politics of genocide | National Post.