On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden declared that Russia was engaged in genocide in Ukraine. The allegation tossed off by Biden is a lie, but it is more than this. It is a political provocation consciously aimed at whipping up a public hysteria to legitimize a massive escalation of the war, including the full-scale, open participation by the United States.
Genocide is a word stamped with profound historical content. There is no graver charge that can be leveled.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and lawyer, coined the word “genocide”—a coupling of the Greekgenos(race or people) with the Latincide(killing)—in 1944 in his book,Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Both the word itself and its subsequent legal codification by the United Nations were inextricably bound up with the Holocaust. . . . . .
The United Nations in 1948, in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, codified an international legal definition of genocide as specific crimes “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
The crimes of the Holocaust were seared in the consciousness of the world. Genocide was the premeditated and systematic extermination of a population because of its race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. The monstrous crimes of imperialism and war were weighed in popular consciousness by this measure, and those that began to approximate its barbarisms were deemed genocidal. . . . . .
When the UN Convention on Genocide was completed in 1948, the United States would not sign and did not do so for another forty years. There was a nervous awareness that charges might be raised against the United States for its wars in Korea and Vietnam, for the carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia, and the use of Agent Orange and napalm.
In 1988, when Washington finally signed the convention against genocide, it was with the stipulation that the United States was granted immunity from prosecution for genocide unless the US national government authorized it. . . . . .
The last thirty years have witnessed the uninterrupted crimes of US empire in the Middle East and Central Asia. Hospitals and villages were deliberately bombed. Cities were reduced to rubble. Economic sanctions starved hundreds of thousands of children to death, and drone strikes killed them at play.
Biden stands at the head of this blood-soaked power and accuses Russia of genocide. The charges deliberately mangle and distort both the contemporary facts and the historically established legal definition.
Nothing that has happened in Ukraine can be measured on the genocidal scale established by the Nazis and the United States and other imperialist powers. Biden’s accusation trivializes the Holocaust and does violence to history.
Biden’s accusations of genocide are not the rhetorical overreach of moral indignation. They are the deliberate and reckless escalation of conflict in service to the interests of US imperialism and they target Washington’s enemies.
The US is preparing for direct military conflict with Russia. Biden speaks of genocide—blurring painfully acquired legal, historical, and moral distinctions—for the purposes of war propaganda.
In an unmistakable sense, Biden is cultivating a genocidal frame of mind, marked by irrational scapegoating and hatred on the basis of nationality. Biden’s false use of this term is setting into motion a global war which could prove to be genocidal, one in which the subject of the genocide is the human race itself. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/04/15/pers-a15.html
