[PEN-L:9571] RE: Rummel et al

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well, Glory Be. I can agree with Brad D.

As to the term for the major crime , how about just "slavery". Lets just associate with the term "slavery" an enormous sense of crime. It is different but equally aggregious as genocide. I believe slavery , like genocide, is a specific crime in international law (UN etc.). Since America is so into "freedom" and being the "free world" , it should be a natural to think of slavery as a crime as evil as mass murder. You know, give me liberty or give me death implies slavery is worse than murder.

One term that might encompass both "genocide" and the slave trade and slave plantation system is "world historic crime against humanity".

On the issue of not aiming to kill as differentiating from genocide, think of the analogy of a beast of burden or other domesticated work animal. The treatment of some of the population is to kill intentionallly or negligently those who become expendable, So, the enslaved Africans did have a genocide committed against them in combination with treatment as domesticated work animals which inherently sought to keep them alive. However, this life was sometimes being worked to death. These deaths are genocidal. As a Nurembourg-style prosecutor I would have two counts in a hypothetical indictment of the American slaveowners : slaveowning and genocide.


Charles Brown



>>> Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 07/22/99 02:05PM >>>
>
>
>I think this war over terminology --
>was it genocide, or what -- is political in an
>unconstructive sense.  Calling the treatment of
>native Americans or the Middle Passage "genocide"
>is a rhetorical instrument for indicting bourgeois
>demoratic capitalism (BDC) at its root.  That doesn't
>mean the term is inappropriate....
>
>mbs

Let me disagree with Comrade Max: it is not inappropriate and not
unconstructive to call the treatment of native Americans by
English-speaking immigrants from Europe "genocide." I do think that
we need another, different word for the Middle Passage because its
point was not to destroy whole populations but to enslave them (or,
rather, to enslve the half that survived given the "economically
efficient" mode of transportation that was used). I don't know what
that word is, but we need to give it the same emotional loading that
"genocide" carries. And I don't think that anyone can understand
America today without grasping the crimes committed by followers of
the Patriarchal-Master-Race brand of democracy that was America's.
Claims of "genocide" are a useful rhetorical instrument.

And they have the additional advantage of telling the history like it
really happened...


Brad DeLolng