An open application to join Kofi Annan’s speech writing team

Because I’d make a few tweaks to his op-ed on Holocaust education and genocide prevention. I’d clean up some sloppy language and some bad metaphors. And lest you think that’s just snotty writer talk, here’s the point up front: The metaphors we use about genocide tell us what we think causes it. And I think Annan’s focus on prejudice as the culprit behind mass killing is wrong.  I also think it lets him off the hook.

• “Yet it is surprisingly hard to find education programs that have clearly succeeded in linking the history of the Holocaust with the prevention of ethnic conflict and genocide in today’s world.”

This is an unfair standard for education. It would be extraordinarily difficult to demonstrate, in a methodologically sound way, a link between Holocaust education and genocide prevention. Not least because the number of people who can “clearly” be shown to have prevented genocide when they had the opportunity to do so is a rather small sample. (Annan, alas, should know.)

• Annan says Holocaust education should be linked to “other instances of genocide, and with ethnic conflicts or tensions in our own time and place.”

He implies that not only does no one do this; they don’t know how to. If I worked for him, I would refer him to Facing History and Ourselves, an organization known internationally for doing just that. (This is not an endorsement. I’ve got some issues with them; see below.)

• “It is easy to identify with the victims. But if we want to prevent future genocides, is it not equally important to understand the psychology of the perpetrators and bystanders.”

No. It’s actually not easy to identify with the victims. It may be easy (we hope) to sympathize with them. A lot of the Holocaust education pedagogy is based on the hope (assumption?) that sympathizing with the victims of the Holocaust comes hand in hand with empathizing with anyone the student might perceive as the “other” and not doing bad things to them, from bullying to killing.

But to identify with the victims, of the Holocaust or any genocide? After two decades of talking to survivors, half of that when I didn’t have a damn clue what I was doing and half of it when I got a better idea, I’m convinced that’s impossible.

(PS: The psychology of perpetrators and bystanders is not an undeveloped field, to say the least. It’s also not terribly underrepresented in the Holocaust curricula I know. And I know more than any non-educator should.)

• Annan wants to know if Holocaust education is an “effective prophylactic” against “the challenges we face today.” With the latter unenumerated, it’s hard to say. But that’s not the point.

The point is, genocide is not the presenting symptom of a disease. It is not the terminal end stage of prejudice and hatred. There’s plenty of prejudice and hatred around the world that has not erupted into genocide, and no, not all of it is latent genocide waiting to happen.

There are a lot of theories about why genocide happens. Helen Fein, in a book it’s almost impossible to buy any more (Genocide: A Sociological Perspective), gives a description of a dozen or more variations on the term genocide — things like ethnocide, and I’ve forgotten many others — and to me, each term implies a different way of thinking about the cause. Why? Because each is a different policy, so to speak, a different strategy with a different objective.

Which is precisely the point: For my money, genocide is not actually a matter of how much prejudice exists in a society, and whether our kids need their Diary of Anne Frank booster shots every few years. It’s a policy choice. It’s a rational decision by political actors to achieve a strategic objective. By rational I don’t mean logical; I mean a calculated choice designed to achieve a certain end. It’s an extreme method of doing things, sure, and it’s often preceded by “test balloons” which are less extreme (thanks, Greg Stanton). Which is to say, observers can identify patterns of behavior that suggest genocide may be among the menu of options under consideration.

In this reading, by the time you’re sending Kofi a fax begging for troops, you’re a little late. You’re in the genocide response phase, not the genocide prevention phase.

There are a lot of other theories on what causes genocide, of course, and there are a lot of criticisms of this point of view. One of them is that it’s too narrow, and I often get asked, “Well if 5 million people are dead in Congo but you can’t demonstrate genocidal intent by political actors there, is it as bad as genocide?”

So let me preempt all of that by saying I think of ‘genocide’ the way E.O. Wilson thinks of ‘genus’ — as a category, in his case for a species, in my case for a kind of behavior. It is not a moral or emotional judgment, although I get emotional when thinking about it (and especially when thinking about non-response). But categories are only useful insofar as they distinguish one thing from another in a way that helps understand something bigger. And in pursuit of that particular objective, I distinguish genocide from mass killing from crimes against humanity from war from excess mortality…

What Annan should be asking is: What runs through the minds of agents of power who are presented with a policy choice that either advances genocide or doesn’t when they make their decisions?

Which is in fact the question I’d most love this man in particular to answer.