A. Dirk Moses: Nach dem Genozid. Grundlage für eine neue Erinnerungskultur [“After genocide. foundations for a new culture of memory], Berlin (Matthes & Seitz) 2023, 160 S.
“After Genocide” – it is difficult these days not to relate the title of the heavily abridged German version of Dirk Moses’ groundbreaking 600-page work ‘Problems of Genocide,’ to Gaza, where Palestinian life is likely to soon cease to exist. But it is precisely in relation to Gaza that the other, actual meaning of the title makes sense: that the accusation of genocide itself is not sufficient to prevent these crimes and that it obscures rather than clarifies them. While the realization is beginning to sink in that Israel’s actions in Gaza are indeed genocide, it is already too late for tens of thousands of people who have been killed, and one senses that the fixation on the genocide paradigm itself may have contributed to this. The institutions of international law are collapsing, and in the moment of their decline, their birth defects are becoming visible.
Unlike the full English version, Moses’ German book makes almost no mention of Palestine. The contemporary case studies are primarily Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but also Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, and China. It was completed before October 7 and probably also takes German sensitivities into account. However, even without explicit reference to Palestine, its main thesis is incompatible with Germany’s state-driven culture of remembrance. In a nutshell: The 1948 Genocide Convention claimed that crimes such as the Holocaust were to be prevented in the future. However, its surgical distinction between military and genocidal intentions (the former aimed at defeat, the latter at destruction) allowed genocidal warfare to escape the narrow definition of the Genocide Convention. Moses says that genocidal and other forms of mass violence against civilians are driven by a pseudo-rationality, namely the pursuit of “permanent security” by preventing anticipated attacks. This is expressed in the unbounded use of terms like “security,” “prevention,” “final solution,” etc. The pseudo-rationality of permanent security normalises genocides but also justifies mass killings and sieges of civilians in non-genocidal or not yet genocidal wars which react to resistance as well as anticipate future threats: with carpet bombing and drone strikes, with the use of nuclear weapons, with starvation and slow death, with colonial crimes of all kinds. In practice, military and genocidal logic and intentions very often go together and are intertwined.
The fact that every child can become a terrorist and every innocent person a “human shield”, in conflicts where the ultimate goal is to combat resistance, makes horrific crimes possible. These then become, almost imperceptibly to the viewer, ethnically and racially charged and escalate into genocide. The targeted populations know from the outset, of course, what criminal dynamics they are exposed to. But the perpetrators, the bystanders, the accomplices can rationalize the crimes by referring to defense and permanent security. Thus “Never again Hamas” inevitably results in the destruction of Gaza, the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, and ethnic cleansing, under the ‘humanitarian’ pretext that this is also done in the interest of the victim population.
The German majority society—in the media, politics, and in academia—has still not forgiven Dirk Moses for exposing the “catechism” of their state-sanctioned memory culture by simply describing its components. With his intervention, Moses had merely suggested getting rid of the ethnic assumptions of the German memory culture and developing it further so that it becomes inclusive of victim memories that are obscured by the singularity thesis with its fixation on ideology.
The German “Historians’ Dispute 2.0,” or whatever one wants to call it, is now unfortunately tainted by, among other things, the fact that Dirk Moses continues to be regularly defamed and associated with Holocaust deniers and relativizers. A discourse analysis of the self-contradictions and empirical falsehoods with which his reputation has been destroyed in the German media is still pending. The May issue of Sehepunkte [points of views], a widely read review journal for historical sciences, recently again alleged in passing that “Moses and others refuse to recognize any special qualities in the Shoah or in Nazi anti-Semitism that fundamentally distinguish the National Socialist mass murder of Jews from colonial genocides,” —and no German colleagues are coming to Moses’ defense. It should go without saying that Moses is aware of the “special qualities” of the Holocaust and the differences between it and colonial genocides. But he analyzes them in their historical context, with the particular temporality that the Holocaust had:
“They planned the elimination of enemy groups in advance. Unlike ‘classical’ imperial violence, much of their violence was deliberately planned. They tried to set the course of history. Seen in this light, the Nazi Reich and its notorious extermination policy mark the culmination of centuries of empire building and the destruction of enemies, both domestic and foreign, whether real or imagined. This imperial project was characterized by a ‘redemptive imperialism’ [Erlösungsimperialismus] because, as Hitler said, it would lead to the historical ‘solution of the German question,’ for which ‘there can only be one path: violence.’ The ‘redemptive anti-Semitism’ [Erlösungsantisemitismus] of the National Socialists was an integral part of this project; after all, the extermination of ‘the Jews’ also represented a fundamental answer to ‘the German question’ for them.” (pp. 104-105)
The contradictory, spiteful, and uncomprehending insinuations that have been leveled against him in Germany were refuted in part elsewhere, but this work might be futile. German memory culture must first free itself from nationalistic misinterpretations of the “lessons of the Holocaust.” A new mass murder of Jews, such as that which took place on October 7, 2023, will not be prevented with the German “Staatsräson” [reason of the state] and its illusions of permanent security. Instead, Germany will become increasingly entangled in war crimes and ongoing genocides. As is now the case in Gaza. That is what Dirk Moses is concerned about.
↗ https://www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de/buch/nach-dem-genozid.html