Purify and destroy Sémelin, Jacques; Schoch, Cynthia; Sémelin, Jacques
2007, 2007., 20070101
eBook, Book
How can we comprehend the sociopolitical processes that give rise to extreme violence, ethnic cleansing, or genocide? A major breakthrough in comparative analysis, Purify and Destroy demonstrates ...that it is indeed possible to compare the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina while respecting the specificities of each appalling phenomenon. Jacques Semelin achieves this, in part, by leading his readers through the three examples simultaneously, the unraveling of which sometimes converges but most often diverges. Semelin's method is multidisciplinary, relying not only on contemporary history but also on social psychology and political science. Based on the seminal distinction between massacre and genocide, Purify and Destroy identifies the main steps of a general process of destruction, both rational and irrational, born of what Semelin terms "delusional rationality." He describes a dynamic structural model with, at its core, the matrix of a social imaginaire that, responding to fears, resentments, and utopias, carves and recarves the social body by eliminating "the enemy." Semelin identifies the main stages that can lead to a genocidal process and explains how ordinary people can become perpetrators. He develops an intellectual framework to analyze the entire spectrum of mass violence, including terrorism, in the twentieth century and before. Strongly critical of today's political instrumentalization of the "genocide" notion, Semelin urges genocide research to stand back from legal and normative definitions and come of age as a discipline in its own right in the social sciences.
The term "genocide" has generated passion and misunderstanding since its coining in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. Applying this term to very heterogeneous historical and current situations brings up many ...objections and debates. The first problem arising from the word genocide concerns its uses, including its memorial, humanitarian, legal, and political purposes. Scholars are divided about its meaning. However, this article stresses that the global digital academic enterprise, Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, represents today a unique effort to gather the most important historical cases of mass human destruction, with respect to their own singularity, while offering a way to compare them according to the same framework of analysis. It builds a strong body of knowledge and follows a rigorous methodology, including a peer-review process. This article also brings some clarifications to three questions: the relationship of genocide studies with international law, the strong tendency in this field to qualify any massacre as genocide, and the legal relevance of the notion of crime against humanity. Adapted from the source document.
...my research is based on a quantitative approach, which no reviewer notices. ...partly thanks to the actions of Jewish and non-Jewish organizations whose role I had analyzed at length in the ...original edition of the 2013 book. According to Shannon Fogg, the voices of these survivors are one of the "strength s of the book." ...the weight of antisemitic denunciation in France has been greatly exaggerated, as demonstrated by the recent and rigorous study on the Commissariat-General forjewish Affairs.5 I also note that Fogg and Gildea use the same rhetoric to challenge my results: to a positive example of help, they oppose a negative counterexample of exclusion, as if this was enough to weaken my argument.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
5.
PENSER LES MASSACRES SEMELIN, Jacques; SEMELIN, J
Revue des sciences religieuses,
2012, Letnik:
86, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Taking Mann Seriously? Semelin, Jacques
Political studies review,
September 2006, Letnik:
4, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Michael Mann's two recent books offer a major contribution to the political sociology of mass violence. By developing and endorsing a comparative approach, the author wishes to explain the ...development of authoritarian regimes, above all fascist movements, as well as the phenomenon of ethnic violence. Considering the crucial and traumatic experience of the First World War as a cultural and social matrix, Mann's definition of fascism is particularly concise and enlightening. Mann's pages articulating the role of collective anxiety and even fear, prospering in a particularly unstable political, economic and international context and the security dilemma are among the highest achievements of the book. But what is disturbing in Fascists, is the deliberate choice not to take into consideration the historical and political realities of communist movements during the same period and ignoring Hanna Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism.
The Dark Side of Democracy is a book more innovative and inspiring than earlier works. Contrary to mainstream genocide studies, Mann's work distances itself from the legal front. Sometime overusing the expression ‘ethnic cleansing’, a perverse definition of democracy can lead according to Mann to ethnic mass murders. In modern time, he notes, ‘the people’ has come to mean two things: demos (the mass of the population) and ethnos (the ethnic group that shares a common culture). Consequently, when an ethnic group claims ‘We, the people’, it can involve the rejection, even the eradication, of those who are perceived as aliens. But the murderous phenomena analyzed by Mann cannot be linked to the birth of modern democracy, but rather to a more general evolution, that is the formation of nation-states. What is at stake is not the dark side of democracy, but the dark side of the Nation-State in the modern democratic age. Another major contribution relies on the interpretation of mass violence based on the construction of a social imaginary. Before the massacre becomes an atrocious physical act, it is born from a mental process, from a vision of the other as a problem to be eliminated. It is crucial to distinguish more clearly than the author does two fundamental conceptions of ‘social purity’ that bring about two different figures of the ‘enemy’.
Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust-perpetrators, victims, and bystanders-it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. ...Described by Hilberg as those who were "once a part of this history," bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.
In some countries, France has a strong reputation for antisemitism. This stems from the Dreyfus Affair and even more so from the Vichy government’s role in the deportation of Jews during World War ...II. In their pathbreaking study Vichy France and the Jews(1981), Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton reconstructed the stages of the French state’s collaboration with the Nazis.¹ Eighty thousand Jews, French and foreign, were killed in the Holocaust, 25 percent of the Jewish population identified as such in 1940. This therefore means that 75 percent of the Jews in France escaped this fate, as Serge Klarsfeld, the most
Since the time of Raphael Lemkin's work, genocide studies have been conducted primarily at the intersection of law and social science. As a result, the term ‘genocide’ has frequently been employed in ...a normative sense, leading to considerable conceptual difficulties and debate. How can such problems be overcome? This article comes down firmly in favour of moving away from a legal approach to genocide studies. It recommends the use of non‐normative vocabulary based on the concept of ‘massacre’, this term being suggested as a reference lexical unit. It also puts forward the more general expression ‘destruction process’, whose most dramatic form is massacre. Massacre is not an act of actual ‘madness’ but the response to what the author calls ‘delusional rationality’. In that respect, he distinguishes between two destruction strategies: one aimed at a group's subjugation and the other at its eradication. It is in the latter case that one can refer to a genocidal process. This article thus considers that genocide should not be defined as a static concept but viewed rather as a particular dynamic of civilian destruction, being the product of both its perpetrators' will and of favourable circumstances.
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