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2013 37: 160Capital & ClassChandran Komath

Peterson, by Edward S. Herman and DavidThe Politics of GenocideBook review:

  

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160 Capital & Class 37(1)

can be used to contribute to the critique of structuralist forms of Marxism that continue to influence ‘critical’ analyses.

ReferencesArtous A (2006) Le fétichisme chez Marx: Le marxisme comme théorie critique. Paris: Syllepse.Artous A (2010) Citoyenneté, démocratie, émancipation. Marx, Lefort, Balibar, Rancière, Rosanvallon,

Negri. Paris: Syllepse.Bonefeld W, Gunn R, Psychopedis K (eds.) (1992) Open Marxism, vol. 1: Dialectics and History.

London: Pluto Press.Castoriadis C (1975) L’institution imaginaire de la société. Paris: Le Seuil.Collin D (1996) La théorie de la connaissance chez Marx. Prais: L’Harmattan.Garo I (2000) Marx, une critique de la philosophie. Paris: Seuil.Garo I (2009) L’idéologie, ou, La pensée embarquée. Paris: La Fabrique.Garo I (2011) Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx. La politique dans la philosophie. Paris:

Demopolis.Kouvelakis S (2007) La France en revolte: Luttes sociales et cycles politiques. Paris: Textuel.Sayer D (1987) The Violence of Abstraction: The Analytic Foundations of Historical Materialism.

Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Tran HH (2003) Relire ‘Le Capital’: Marx, critique de l’économie politique et objet de la critique de

l’économie politique. Lausanne: Editions Page Deux.Vincent JM (1976) Fétichisme et société. Paris: Anthropos.

Author biographyRomain Felli received his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Lausanne. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the University of Manchester, with a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation. His research interests lie in international political economy, environmental governance, trade unions and political thought. Recent publications include ‘Neoliberalising adaptation to environmental change: Foresight or foreclosure?’ Environment and Planning A, VOL. 44, No.1 (2012), with Noel Castree.

Edward S. Herman and David PetersonThe Politics of Genocide, Monthly Review Press: New York, 2010, 159 pp: 9781583672129, US$12.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by Chandran Komath, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Herman and Peterson’s book fundamentally critiques ‘the basic outline of the politics of genocide’ in contemporary times. By employing three ingenious frameworks (‘construc-tive’, ‘nefarious’ and ‘benign’) for disentangling the politics of genocide, the volume brilliantly captures the sheer hypocrisy of ‘genocide-oriented intellectuals and media’ and the cruelties of Western humanitarian interventions that evidently reflect a ‘huge politi-cal bias’ in favour of the USA and other imperialist countries. Unsurprisingly, the inten-sity of the crimes and the worth of the victim’s life are decided by a single criterion: that of ‘who is responsible for carrying them out’ (p. 16). The crimes and mass killings com-mitted by the USA and other imperialist powers are always ‘constructive’, therefore the

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‘victims are unworthy’ and this cannot thus be called ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘genocide’. However, mass murders carried out by US allies and clients are ‘benign’. Finally, brutali-ties carried out by enemies of the USA are ‘nefarious’, and therefore victims deserve immediate attention and rigorous punishment for the perpetrators.

Herman and Peterson’s analysis painstakingly reveals the role of media pundits, human rights intellectuals, international NGOs and their criminal silence over US-supported mass killings in various parts of the world. Liberal academic and media treatment of human rights violations, and their laments over ‘crimes against humanity’, are always selective. Their explanations do not touch any of the mass killings perpetrated by the USA, and ‘whenever the United States colludes in a genocidal process’, they pre-tend that ‘U.S. guilt is at worst that of remaining a mere “bystander”, but never that of an accomplice, let alone a perpetrator’ (p. 64). Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize winning (2003) book ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide, is a classic example in this regard.

The section ‘Constructive Genocides’ includes various cases of mass murders, like the thirteen years (1992-2003) of economic sanctions that killed a million people, mainly children and women, and the occupation and destruction of Iraq, which killed a million and displaced around 5 million, by Anglo-American forces in 2003. The economic sanctions imposed upon Iraq destroyed that country’s social fabric, and its impact was genocidal. Massive bombings and destruction and the looting of archaeo-logical heritage were serious crimes, but still ‘it is the Iraqis who owe the United States a debt’ (p. 37). For the Western establishment, these ‘sanctions of mass destructions’ were constructive, and therefore the victims were unworthy. The authors point out that in Iraq’s case, media references to ‘genocide’ numbere eighty, but in ‘Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda and Darfur, four Nefarious cases, the usage ran to 481, 323, 3, 199, and 1,172 respectively’ (p. 33).

The book discusses the Western ‘politics of framing’ false questions in the context of various political conflicts and violence. The political conflicts in Darfur have been treated as ‘nefarious’. Here, ‘genocide’ was used ninety times, and was successfully racialised as an ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Black Africans by Arab Muslim rulers. The death toll was twenty times more violent than in the Democratic Republic of Congo; but for the West it was a benign bloodbath because it had the complete the support of the USA, France, and Britain. Conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995) and Kosovo (1998-1999) were labelled as ‘Serb evil and violence’, and portrayed as the ethnic cleansing, genocide and massacre of Bosnian Muslims, Croatians, and Kosovo Albanians. The ‘Srebrenica mas-sacre’ (July 1995) got huge attention in the Western media and political circles, and was ‘cited heavily and repeated endlessly, and with great indignation, to demonstrate that “genocide” actually had taken place in Bosnia’ (p. 47). Here, ‘genocide’ was applied 323 times. The Western media creation of ‘mythical bloodbaths’ in Racak (the ‘Racak Massacre’, 15 January 1999) narrated the story of killings and the destruction of Kosovan villages by Serbs, and immediately described it as genocide, which gave justification for NATO’s intervention. However, there was no discussion of the killings of thousands of Serbs by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and NATO bombing in Yugoslavia. Croatia’s ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Serbs (Operation Storm) in the Balkan war was a ‘benign’ bloodbath, for the free press and humanitarian intellectuals.

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In Rwanda, they projected a Hutu ‘genocide’ against the Tutsi minority (with media references to ‘genocide’ seventeen times). The role of Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in the killings of thousands of Hutus and the overthrowing of the multiethnic coalition government of Juvénal Habyarimana and their role in the blood-baths in Congo (‘one genocide reference for every 317,647 deaths’) did not disturb any of the Western media; instead, Kagame was described as the ‘founding father of New Africa’. When the Phalange militias slaughtered around 3,000 Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila, the word ‘genocide’ was applied only four times in the media, and only once in the New York Times. The Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2008-2009 (Operation Cast Lead) killed 1,400 people, and due to the continuous Israeli blockade of Gaza, it has become one of the largest open prisons in the world; however, we do not hear any cry over this silent genocide. In the 1980s, with the support of both the Bush and Clinton administrations, Turkey carried out a systematic pogrom against Kurds that killed around 30,000 people and destroyed some 35 hundred villages, while 3 million became refugees. The Halabja massacre of Kurds under Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was carried out with US knowledge, but it won attention and notoriety only after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, so that ‘the worthiness of Kurdish victims rises or falls in accord with the identity of their tormentors’ (p. 88).

The volume also analyses the partiality and bias of the upholders of ‘international justice’, particularly the functioning and jurisprudence of International Criminal Tribunals and the International Criminal Court. Notwithstanding ICC’s rhetoric on applying law to ‘all persons equally’ and ‘“ending impunity” and bringing about account-ability for the mass slaughter of civilians,’ the authors argue that ‘race and power’ still dominate its course of actions (p. 105). International law and war crimes are only appli-cable to the weaker countries and its leaders, whereas total impunity is given to US-backed leaders and mass murderers. Moreover, the ICC has already become an instrument for punishing Africans only, and this has been evident in the various verdicts given by the ICC (all fourteen of the ICC’s indictees were black Africans, and the recent indictment of Thomas Lubango Dyilo for war crimes in eastern Congo support the aforementioned argument). More shockingly, in March 2012, the ICC rejected the Palestinian petition (due to the absence of statehood for Palestine) for the prosecution of Israeli leaders for war crimes committed during ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in Gaza. As the authors rightly observe, all the crimes ‘committed by the Great White-Northern Powers against people of color’ have never, in history, reached the threshold of gravity of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (‘R2P’) doctrine for blood baths, nor put an ‘end to impunity’ for mass murder-ers (p. 112).

However, it is a little strange that the book does not discuss anything regarding the ongoing US sanctions against Cuba, which have already completed fifty years and became extra-territorial in nature, thereby clearly violating the UN Charter and various international laws. Despite successive UN General Assembly resolutions voting to lift criminal sanctions against Cuba (twenty times up to 2011), the USA still wants to repeat the same brutalities that have happened in the case of Iraq during the thirteen years of ‘sanctions for mass murders’. However, such absences do not diminish the value of this unusual book, which scrupulously exposes the unimaginable cruelties of imperialism, which should be enough to haunt our political present. It is therefore a must read for those who believe in genuine humanity and justice.

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Author biographyChandran Komath is a Ph.D. student currently pursuing his doctoral studies on recog-nition and historical injustice at the Centre for Political Studies in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. His articles or reviews have been published in the Indian Journal of Politics, Indian Journal of Politics and International Relations, Review of African Political Economy, Race and Class, Contemporary South Asia and the Political Studies Review.

Daniela TepeThe Myth about Global Civil Society: Domestic Politics to Ban Landmines, Palgrave: Basingstoke, 2012, 208 pp: 9780230279148, £55 (hbk)

Reviewed by Michael Merlingen, Central European University, Hungary

This book could have been an important contribution to Marxian research. It is not. Its unfulfilled promise is to draw on Marxian state theory in order to explain the manner in which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) shape foreign policy and international regime formation.

In December 1997, the legally binding Ottawa Convention to ban anti-personnel land-mines was signed. An extensive International Relations (IR) literature has demonstrated that national NGO campaigns loosely linked to each other via the International Campaign to Ban Landmines played a key role in bringing about this result by reframing land-mines, transforming them from a national security to a human security issue. Yet little is known about how national contexts affected the role of NGOs as change-makers. Tepe links this gap to the preoccupation of much NGO research with global civil society. Hence, she sets out to explain the cross-national variation of the successful anti-landmine campaigns in the UK and Germany – variations in membership, strategies and goals. Her wager is that such an account cannot succeed unless it pays attention to the nation-ally specific nature of the capitalist state and society in the two countries. To this end, she employs ‘a materialist state-theory framework’ (p. 2).

Tepe seeks to highlight the added value of her approach by contrasting it with existing NGO research, notably liberal-constructivist IR. Surprisingly, she does not discuss main-stream social movement theory with its focus on political opportunity structures, fram-ing and resource mobilisation. Tepe acknowledges that liberal-constructivists have analysed how state–society relations shape the capacity of NGOs to influence public policy. Yet they fail to take into account ‘the historically specific implementation of states’ (p. 18). Tepe neither elaborates on what she means by this notion, nor does she zero in on other shortcomings of liberal-constructivism. One prominent model, which she discusses, draws attention to the degree of state centralisation and the nature of pol-icy networks linking state and civil society, but fails to consider how the balance of class forces materialises as strategic selectivity in state institutions. Also, liberal-constructivism has little to say about how policy content shapes NGO effectivity – say, about how NGOs are affected by the nature of variable hegemonic projects which influence where boundaries are drawn and what gateways are opened between the state and civil society. More problematic still, Tepe’s strategy in reviewing liberal-constructivist research is to

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