Uma resenha de livro que parece ter vindo bem a calhar (certamente, não era essa a intenção da autora quando preparou a obra, provavelmente uma tese de doutorado), num momento em que genocídios e Holocausto são discutidos exaustivamente, nem sempre pelas boas razões ou com a precisão histórica requerida. (PRA)
Greetings Paulo Roberto Almeida,  H-Diplo: New posted contentJones on O'Byrne, 'The Genocide Paradox: Democracy and Generational Time' [Review]O'Byrne, Anne. The Genocide Paradox: Democracy and Generational Time. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 256 pp. $110.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781531503253.$32.00 (paper), ISBN 9781531503260. Reviewed by Adam Jones (University of British Columbia Okanagan) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=59696 For quite some time in comparative genocide studies, a certain contradiction—even a fetishism—has been evident in Raphael Lemkin’s enduringly powerful “G-word.”[1] The “geno-” prefix, drawn from the Greek genos, privileges lineage and tribal/national affiliation as determinants of human collectives and identities. But so, too, do perpetrators of the crime, seeking to extirpate people en masse according to atavistic understandings of imputed race and tribal affiliation. Does “genocide” thereby reproduce essentialist, reactionary framings of culture and belonging? Anne O’Byrne asks, in The Genocide Paradox, does genos act to supplant and undermine demos as a (much preferable) organizing principle of human affairs? “Democracies,” she writes at the outset of her stimulating essay, “are remarkable for being founded on nothing other than themselves. They are supported by no divine or natural right”—or, we might add, blood-based kinship—“and those who belong to a democracy do so by virtue of belonging to the people.… The demos, specifically and above all, is not a genos” (p. 1). But by “identifying genocide as a distinctive evil, perhaps the worst there is, we reinforce our commitment to the genos and thus reinforce one of the conditions that produce genocidal violence” (p. 4). Yet kinship-derived cultures are seductive, offering a “blend of pleasure, fantasy, joy, and security” (p. 64). They allow one to sublimate fragile individuality and personal mortality in mostly imagined communities that extend temporally both backward and forward. Hence the “generational time” of O’Byrne’s subtitle. Genos “keeps the world peopled, links us to past and future, and underwrites whatever sense we have that how things are now is how they may continue” (p. 101). With philosophical excursions via Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, and Michel Foucault, among other figures, O’Byrne traces the allure of genos and its modern, scientized, deromanticized variants—namely, DNA and forensic studies, which assume “the authority of absolute knowledge that suggests absolute belonging” (p. 81). The contemporary genealogical craze reflects humans’ hunger for something that “anchor[s] us in the past and orient[s] us for a future” (p. 85). These preoccupations help us to answer the provocative question raised by O’Byrne’s third chapter: “What’s Wrong with Genocide?” That is, why has Lemkin’s neologism resonated so powerfully since the 1940s, as “the crime of crimes” and the most atrocious of human violations? O’Byrne suggests that a special horror within the horror—sexual violence and forced impregnation as genocidal strategies—likewise reflects our particular concern about the interruption and violation of “natural” kinship and genos-defined community. Against such preoccupations both ancient and quintessentially modern, O’Byrne closes her piquant essay with a ringing call for democratic understandings of shared identity. What democracy “requires of its citizens is not obedience or loyalty but judgment … a democracy must constantly decide how to sustain the impulse and practices that make its world” (p. 129). By downplaying the “concern with the genos in human affairs, [and] loosen[ing] our commitments to genetic identities,” an opportunity would open to “finally acknowledge one another simply, or at least principally, as fellow human beings” (p. 131). The Genocide Paradox is wide-ranging despite its brevity, written with verve and even urgency. It clarifies key assumptions smuggled into the genocide concept, and why they—and Lemkin’s word itself—resonate more in today’s atomized, marooned cultures than perhaps ever before. Note [1]. See, e.g., the discussion in Stephen Holmes, “Looking Away,” review of “A Problem from Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power, London Review of Books, November 14, 2002, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n22/stephen-holmes/looking-away. Adam Jones is a professor of political science and the University of British Columbia Okanagan. He is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (4th edition, 2023). He has worked as an expert consultant with the United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Citation: Adam Jones. Review of O'Byrne, Anne. The Genocide Paradox: Democracy and Generational Time. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. February, 2024. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |
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