Christopher Hitchens

Thank you for that very generous introduction. And thank you ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters for coming. Is this echoing for you as it is for me? No. Yeah, no? Audible. Very well.

I thought I’d begin with a brief mission statement.

John Prendergast and my colleagues and I have the feeling that people like you come to meetings like this not just to listen or to absorb, but also to feedback and to contribute. So with your permission, I’ll yield back some minutes of my allotted time so that we can have the question period be subjected to your opinions when we’re through.

That’s the first thing.

The second is I’m incredibly relieved to be followed by John Prendergast who knows a great deal more about this subject than I do and who I think it can fairly be said of him, he’ll be introduced I’m sure on his own, that without his efforts the question of Darfur might have completely disappeared from the headlines and the political agenda.

I can speak for myself having been taken by him to Uganda to investigate the crimes and atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army, one of the most vicious organizations on the planet, that he has the full knowledge not just about how to think about genocide and its consequences, but also some very important suggestions about what to do about it, which frees me in the time I’ve left for myself to confine my remarks, essentially to how to think about it linguistically, how to define, how to confront this appalling problem.

You don’t often get, I’m invited to debates all the time, it’s very seldom that I’m asked to take the anti-genocide position in a debate, and then Mr. whoever it might be or Madam will be taking the pro-genocide one.

You don’t somehow, if you’ll forgive any flippancy on this question, which you probably shouldn’t, so to speak, you don’t get that lucky.

What you get with genocide is what Harold Abrams says in Chariots of Fire about anti-Semitism, you catch it on the edge of the remark, you catch it in the fugitive remark, the euphemism, the shame-faced denial, but you catch it in the end, and it’s worth trading yourself to look out for the symptoms, I think.

Today is the first of April, in a couple of weeks the Armenian population of this city and many others, I hope supported by you, will be commemorating the terrible day in 1915 when the Ottoman Turkish authorities gave in effect a general order for the mass destruction of the Christian Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire.

And they don’t just have to remember this terrible event, there are a few of them left now who do physically remember it. I used to speak every year in Times Square in mid-April, with a row of old ladies and old men in the front of the audience who were survivors. They’ve all died now.

And they all died not just in the knowledge of what had happened to their families and their friends and their communities, and the extirpation not just of them physically, but the destruction of their churches, the destruction of their libraries, the renaming of their towns, the attempt to erase them from the map, the production of new atlases in Turkey that failed to show there was ever an Armenian province, the cultural erasure, they didn’t just die in the knowledge of that, they died in the knowledge that it was still said that it had never happened to them.

This I think is the crowning insult, and the one that above all cries out for justice. Not even an admission that it had happened.

But if you go into the matter with Turkish parliamentarians as I have, this month they will again protest that the US Congress, the Swedish parliament, others have affirmed the Armenian mass killing as genocide. They will again be threats from Turkey, they will cut off relations with all countries, they will even dare to name it as such. Every parliament in the world discusses it, not the Turkish one. Flat, stone faced denial.

But go into it a bit further and you will suddenly hear them say, “Well, the Armenians were taking the Russian side in the First World War.

They were a subversive minority within our borders. They didn’t follow our religion.” So you say to them, “Ah, so I see.”

So you say it never happened but it would have been very justifiable if it did happen. And you catch them and you realize and they see it in your face and you see it in theirs. Oh yes, I shouldn’t have put it quite like that. Isn’t it of enormous interest that the neo-Nazi forces and their apologists now in America and in Europe and elsewhere do not say, “Yes, it’s true that we tried to make an end to the foul Jewish people who were the main threat to German and Aryan civilization. That we are proud of our attempt to rid the world of this unwanted hideous tribe.” No, they say, “No, we never tried it.

It never happened.” Holocaust denial is the form it takes. When you think of a real Nazi, he would be for Holocaust affirmation.

So always look to the language. You will find it in there. You will find concealed in this the filthy traces and footsteps of the foulest of all crimes, the attempt to destroy not just the nationality and the physical being of a people but its culture, its history and all traces of its pre-existence.

And again you will find when you really argue with these people, they will say, “Well, the Jews were boycotting Germany. They were sabotaging the German economy.

Many of them joined the Communist Party. They were on the side of the Soviet Union.” Once again, they stop suddenly denying and they begin in a shame-faced way to affirm.

So I think, especially as I’m talking tonight at an institution of higher learning, I would just draw attention to the fact that it’s in the denials, it’s in the historical obfuscations, it’s in the attempts to distort and dilute the historical record that you will find the important clue.

Now that’s easy to say, isn’t it, when we’re talking about Ottoman Turkish mass murderers or brown and black-shirted Nazis and fascists.

But in fact, there is an invasion in our own language when we talk about this and it’s quite recent and it’s happened in a democratic society with an open press.

And it’s happened in your memory and your lifetime even if you don’t particularly care to notice it.

Why did Madeleine Albright, then Secretary of State, and Bill Clinton, then no, then actually Ambassador to the United Nations, later Secretary of State, and Bill Clinton, then President of the United States, why did they not call the attempt by the Hutu population or the extremist wing of it in Rwanda to destroy the Tutsi population and the model Hutu?

Why was this not called genocide? When it was plainly the attempt to extirpate an entire population in whole or in part.

Because if you call it genocide, and you are as our country is, a signatory to the genocide convention, once you’ve called it genocide you’re mandated not just to protest about it but to do something about it.

The convention is very plain. If you call it by its right name, you must act either to prevent it, if it can be prevented, to halt it if it’s been started, or to punish it if it’s been completed.

And so in our own lifetimes, we have no right to sneer at other cultures who have used euphemism.

We decided not to call it by its right name for a long time until the business was nearly done so as to avoid the responsibility for it.

So this is something that lives right near you and can come to your society and infect your political dialogue.

It’s not a thing that happens in other places, or not just. I wanted to start by making that as plain as I could.

I should add, and I’m partly going to leave this to John, but I remember very well going to see Colin Powell when he was Secretary of State under the last administration, and him finally agreeing, after being pressed for nearly two years, to call what was happening in Darfur genocide, and for the same reason, the same reluctance, the same reason, if we call it that, it means we are responsible for doing something about it. Now nobody forced you, nobody forced your country or your government to sign the genocide convention.

But it’s a solemn pact once you have signed it. And once that finding has been made, it is something that is going to involve you too.

And as we speak in Africa, terrible things are being done, in effect in our name, because of our reluctance to face the real meaning of the language on this question.

In the past century, therefore, in Europe, just in civilized Christian, let’s just call it civilized Europe, in the 20th century, I was born halfway through that century, the century is inaugurated by an attempt to destroy the Christian Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire very nearly successfully, almost to complete erasure and destruction.

It climaxes in the middle of the century with an attempt to destroy the Jewish people of Eastern and Central, and indeed Southern Europe, which is also very nearly successful.

It almost succeeds in the utter destruction of a whole people, a whole culture, a whole architecture, a whole library system, very nearly a language.

And it closes, or very nearly closed, with an attempt by Christians, mainly Orthodox and some Catholic, in the former Yugoslavia, to erase the Muslim population of Bosnia and then of Kosovo.

And some of you, I can tell by looking, aren’t quite old enough to remember this, but those of you who do will remember how the people of Kosovo were loaded onto the trains at gunpoint.

We thought we’d never see this again in Europe. We thought we’d never see this again after the end of the Second World War, after the end of the Cold War, after the fall of totalitarianism, that we would once again see people being actually packed onto the trains for mass deportation and their homes taken away from them and those who resisted shot out of hand, as they already had been, as if to encourage the idea of flight and exile and deportation in Bosnia.

If you’ve ever had to see this in person, and had to see it in civilized Europe, an hour’s flying time from Rome, an hour’s flying time from Vienna, two hours from London, an hour and a half from Paris, that’s as far as you had to go to watch it happening and then to hear the pathetic excuses that were made about why not to do anything about it.

This brings me to a second language problem. The word genocide wasn’t even coined until 1942 or 1943 by a brilliant lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, operating in Geneva, who thought we did need a word for it.

Up till then there hadn’t been a word for the attempt to destroy whole people or their culture or their physicality.

When Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador in Turkey, reported back to Washington in 1915-16 about what was happening in the Turkish provinces, particularly Harput and Van provinces, where the main concentrations of Armenians were, he got reports directly. We can read them. You can read them in a wonderful book called “Slaughterhouse Provinces”, a first-hand account from the local American consular officials about the putting to the sword of the Armenian people.

Morgenthau reported to the State Department what is happening here and what we can witness to is a process of race murder.

In a way, race murder is a more electrifying, more galvanizing term, isn’t it, than genocide. Genocide is somehow rather technical. It’s almost too clinical.

Race murder gives you a better sense of what we’re talking about and how it might feel to witness it.

But then for humanists like myself and I hope yourselves, the whole term race is problematic.

I mean, what we argue is that the human race is not subdivided by species. We are only one species.

All the other divisions between us are, in a sense, artificial. And this raises another question, not an uninteresting one.

Can genocide be committed by people of the same ethnicity upon one another? It’s not an unimportant question at all.

The million or so Cambodians who were killed by the Khmer Rouge were being killed by fellow Cambodians.

It’s true that the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia was singled out for an especially vicious and barbarous treatment.

But in general, it was Cambodians upon Cambodians. Does this qualify as genocide? Do we think of ourselves racially or do we think of ourselves as human?

Very worthwhile subject, I think, to possibly to divide and to disagree about. But we know it when we see it.

We know the idea of what I would call “exterminism”, the idea that all those who don’t agree or who don’t belong or who somehow haven’t subscribed to the right ideology must be killed.

And the same, I think, is going to face us very soon in the case of North Korea, where the population of North Korea is being starved to death.

And enslaved by other North Koreans. You probably know that the average height of the surviving North Koreans, those who came through the famine of the last decade, is six inches less than a South Korean.

It takes a lot, a lot of cruelty to starve people down by six inches. But it was done.

And it’s going on now as we’re sitting here. And many of those are people who are going to die or be hopelessly stunted, especially the children, mentally as well as physically. And the question is, is this too the kind of thing that ought to mandate intervention, as the Genocide Convention does? And this is a question I’m only going to ask.

I hope that you will come up with some answers.

I think I said totalitarian a moment ago. If I didn’t say it enough, when we use the term final solution, which was the Nazi expression for, or euphemism you might say, for the Jewish question.

Endlosen in German, final, put an end to it, over. You see there the totalitarian mentality.

You see the idea that there are problems that can have final solutions.

That there are ideologies, that there are ethnicities, parties, religions that are absolutist, that can bring an end to history.

That by sheer force, by sheer will, by sheer cruelty, can destroy everything in their path.

The relationship I want to suggest here to you is a very close one between the genocidal mentality and the totalitarian one.

It’s when you get a supreme leader. It’s when you get a race theory that promotes one tribe of humans above another.

It’s when you get a theocratic belief that all those who don’t subscribe to the one true faith are going to hell anyway, so why bother to keep them on the planet?

It’s out of totalitarianism and it’s a special method, which is total war, that you get the idea that people can be treated as rubbish, as germs, as vermin, as viruses, which is why another euphemism, ethnic cleansing.

Ethnic cleansing doesn’t sound too bad, does it?

Until you think of its implications, which are that certain people are simply filth and only there to be cleaned up or cleaned up.

Only then you see yourself looking straight down the gun barrel of the totalitarian regime, party, religion or system.

Someone ought to tell me what I’m trespassing on the time I said I’d restrict myself to.

We didn’t agree, did we? Someone waving me a card. Do I have a moment or two left, you think?

Two, he thinks. Christ. Okay, I think I could probably do it.

So what I would want to call this fusion between the totalitarian idea and the genocidal method would be something like this, the synthesis would be exterminism, exterminationism.

And the terrifying thing about that is it’s one thing to think about being able to vaporize a whole people or a whole class of people or a whole nation of people and it’s another thing to be actually able to do it and in the time we live in, the means by which a genocide can be accomplished have become a lot more sophisticated and somewhat more widespread, even than were available to the National Socialist Party in Germany.

And it’s this that’s really begun to worry me and other people who follow this subject.

I’ve seen the attempt to destroy the Kurdish, non-Arab peoples of northern Iraq.

I’ve actually smelled the chemical weaponry and the poison gas that was used in Khalabja.

And also if you want to know what totalitarianism smells like, it smells a bit like chemical weapons and the sound of people coughing up their own lungs and burns that won’t go out and won’t go away.

Thousands and thousands of people can be killed in an afternoon with weapons like this and then they go on dying to the number of we think about 180,000 in a few months.

A really serious attempt in front of our very eyes to make a way with a whole group of people.

I saw the same happening in Bosnia, in Europe in my own lifetime.

I’ve seen North Korea, the most grotesque totalitarian state that exists.

And I’ve also seen something important that I think must be mentioned.

When this happens to the Kurds, when it happens to the Armenians, when it happens to the Bosnians, it isn’t just happening to them.

If we watch it in silence, if we watch it with complicity, if we allow it to happen, we are all endangering ourselves.

The ideologies that do that to them are ideologies that in the end will do that to us too.

That express the real intention to subjugate the human race or to intimidate it by force.

In fact, in the most celebrated example of genocide of which we know that of Nazi Germany, it became very plain in the end that Adolf Hitler also wanted the German people to be destroyed if they couldn’t carry out the great task of cleansing Europe of Slavs, of Poles, of Gypsies, under the organizing, regnant principle, the racist principle of anti-Semitism.

They didn’t deserve to live either.

He would bring on destruction so there wasn’t one brick piled upon another in the hood of Germany too.

So it’s a duty of solidarity that we owe.

It’s not a matter of compassion.

It’s not a matter of feeling just sorry for people who are subject to mass murder and deportation.

It’s a matter of realizing that those who will do this sincerely intend the destruction of our civilization as well.

And if that one finger is still up, I should probably close and invite your questions later by saying this.

When the war against fascism in Europe began, a huge number of people, educated people, intellectual people, thoughtful people, in Europe and in America, thought that you could stay out of it, thought that it was an internal affair of Germany, an internal affair of Italy, an internal affair even when those countries invaded Spain.

It was still something that could be contained, that could be ignored, something beyond the seas, something that happened as the British government said about Czechoslovakia when it was invaded by Hitler, to a faraway country of which we know nothing.

And everybody knows the price that had to be paid by civilization for ignoring and postponing that reckoning.

And it’s a price we continue to pay.

Our civilization has actually never recovered from that horrible moment.

And at that point Ernest Hemingway wrote a wonderful novel about Spain.

And it’s called, as you probably know, For Whom the Bell Tells.

And it’s a great sermon by the English poet John Donne who says, “No man is an island, apart from himself, never sent to know, for whom the bell tolls, because it tolls for thee.”

I leave you with that thought and I’m very grateful for your attention. Thank you.

Thank you. Help me in introducing John Prendergast.

John Prendergast:

Thank you, Lee, and thanks as well, Christopher, for your thought-provoking remarks.