The Invisible Armada

25 June 2021

In a context of rampant war of the worlds, where the desires to cross swords are hidden less and less, words, certain words, tend to become weapons. In order to prepare them for this use, they should be subjected to reprocessing so that they become operational on the battlefield. The engineers and mercenaries of the new cold war are working it ardently and are rapidly acquiring expert knowledge in the field.

One of the key words in this new configuration, as we have already noted, is the term "genocide". But the issues that are condensed around it in the war of discourses that is taking shape, both political and philosophical, are of such importance that it is worth returning to them, every day feeding the chronicle of its redeployment – of the inflation of a rhetoric of genocide inspired by the fiercest of nihilisms.

On 22 April, a handful of members of the House of Commons (it has not been possible to establish precisely whether there were five or seven, certainly less than ten, out of 650 members of this august assembly) passed a motion, using a procedural device, describing the campaign of "re-education" of the Uighur population conducted in Xinjiang by the Chinese regime as genocide and crime against humanity.

This motion, devoid of any legislative value and not committing the British Government in any way, is therefore only an approximate publicity stunt undertaken by a quarter of activists relaying on other initiatives, in particular in the United States; it is intended, like so many others, to trivialize or even give legal force to the characterization of the campaign launched by the Chinese Government, accompanied by massive internments in the Xinjiang region, and other infinitely reprehensible practices, as genocide.

This is despite the fact that a few weeks earlier, the Legal Committee of the US State Department had issued an opinion that there was insufficient evidence to qualify the Chinese authorities' policy in Xinjiang as genocide, even though certain practices (forced labor) could be defined as crimes against humanity.

Described as a "farce" in the British press, this frivolous show by the core anti-Chinese lobby in the House of Commons became "breaking news", and on six columns, in Taipei Times two days later: “UK lawmakers call PRC's Uighur policies ‘genocide’” - a title in the form of blatant and deliberate distortion of the facts since it aims to make the reader believe that it was a majority of elected representatives in the House of Commons who adopted this motion. At no time is the ridiculously small number of Members who voted for the motion mentioned in the article. It's not just on crazy social media that fakes news thrives.

On the other hand - and this is where this crude propagandist operation becomes interesting - the article quotes one of the initiators of the motion, a certain Nus Ghani, a conservative MP, long engaged in the anti-Chinese campaign about the situation in Xinjiang and moreover "sanctioned" (declared undesirable) for this reason by the Chinese authorities; Nus Ghani, therefore, takes the opportunity to redefine, on her own authority, the notion of genocide and make it undergo a radical shift: "There is a misunderstanding that genocide is just one act – mass killing. That is false". Then, she adds that her criteria of genocide, the intention to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group are all obviously met in Xinjiang...

In other words, according to these candidates for the position of master of the language exercising their empire on dictionaries and textbooks of political science all around the world, the term "genocide" must be completely redeployed, displaced and extended. From now on, the intention to remove from the face of the earth a human group designated according to its race, its religious affiliation, or national becomes quite subsidiary. To this central notion of the purpose of eradicating, right down to the last, this group (which presupposes the intended and systematic implementation of its extermination), the British lobbyist substitutes the extremely flexible criterion which is condensed in the expression "to destroy in whole or in part", and which therefore aims to give substance to the equally plastic notion of "cultural genocide".

As a result of such a dilution of the concept of genocide, any minority group considering itself to be the victim of discriminatory measures by a state, any authority or another group will be able to say that it is the victim of a project or attempted “genocide” or "cultural genocide", destined to undermine its integrity, identity, its singularity, “in whole or in part”; discrimination affecting linguistic usages, religious practices, mores, become therefore putative or potential genocide: the strong discrimination that hits Muslims in France or India, it is the open door to genocide; the Catalans who consider themselves mistreated by the Spanish state, ditto. The Taiwanese aborigines whose languages and customs are in perpetual deficit of recognition, so!

And, conversely, when the ultras of Taiwanese independence speak of "disinizing" the island, it would, likewise, have a strong scent of genocide...

On this path, genocide becomes the all-inclusive of all those who, as a minority or ill-treated group, have a wrong to assert, against an abusive authority or a more powerful one. The concept loses all its original scope, at the same time as it is intended, in the ulterior motives of those who engage in this operation, to become an absolute weapon against the enemy of the moment – the Chinese regime, in this case.

When he coined this notion in 1944, Rafaël Lemkin had two main objectives: first, to produce the name of an unprecedented crime. If genocide is a word fabricated by combining a Greek root and another, Latin, it is not by chance: it is because it was necessary, in a certain state of emergency, to produce a term intended to designate and pin a mass crime (the racial exterminations perpetrated by the Nazis) of which it appeared, at this turning point in history, when Soviet troops liberated the Nazi extermination camps, that it was not comparable with any state crime of the past and that it was therefore not likely to be adequately designated by the existing nomenclature: bloodbath, carnage, massacre, hecatomb, pogrom, killing... even the word extermination appeared to remain below the crime, not reflecting either the intentionality of the crime (its programming and systematic implementation), or the designation of victims according to the criteria set by the racist, supremacist ideology of the criminal state.

Secondly, the production of the word genocide by Lemkin (a jurist) aims to create the conditions for a justice that stands up to the crimes that were committed by the Nazis. It is therefore necessary, in particular, to be able to rule on the imprescriptibility of some of these crimes and to waive, as far as they are concerned, the general principle of non-retroactivity of the application of laws.

It is therefore clear that the production of the term genocide as a legal and historical category, distinct from the concept of crime against humanity, has a quite specific function: to prevent the relativization of state crimes, historical crimes, committed during the twentieth century and whose singularity can be stated as follows: those who conceive, plan and carry out these crimes intend to remove from the common body of humanity a fraction of it, designated according to racial, ethnic, religious or national criteria, or even social. In their minds, it is a purification operation insofar as the perpetrators cannot coexist on this earth with this part of the human species that they intend to eradicate as completely as possible.

The notion of genocide aims to make conceivable this singularity of a purifying and erasing project implemented under general conditions of "modernity"; it is intended to make it possible, despite all the obstacles, to pull into the path of reparation for the harm suffered by the victims, in particular by preventing modern genocides from being dissolved in a general history of massacres, of historical violence — a formless, timeless, history, devoid of any concept. By definition, therefore, if genocide is to be a concept, if it is to retain its analytical edge, it is necessary, first and foremost, to oppose its dilution and its eclectic and opportunistic uses.

However, the rhetorical outbidding that the patented agitators are engaged in on the Uighur issue is heading in exactly the opposite direction. The strange and singular thing is that this banalizing and instrumental inclination is now giving free rein at a time when we have not yet really emerged and recovered particularly in Western Europe and North America, from another bias, just as damaging: the production of a kind of civil religion of the Holocaust (of the Shoah) whose proper is to be based on another rhetorical operation - the one that aims at making of the destruction of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis the essential Genocide, that is to make the Shoah (the Holocaust) the quintessence of genocide, the absolute and unique referent of genocide. An operation whose effect is to hinder the identification and recognition of other genocides (the Armenian genocide, for example) and to stir up competition among the victims - a spiral that begins as soon as the Shoah, as a European catastrophe, is set as the universal standard of genocide. This operation benefits from the fact that the very genesis of the concept coined by Lemkin is indissociable from this unprecedented criminal event – the “Final Solution” (Endlösung) to the “Jewish problem”, as the Nazi leaders imagined it.

It is not only that the term genocide was constantly drawn into the orbit of the Shoah, in such a massive and pressing way, that other scenes of genocide were under-exposed. It is also that, in the phase in which the discourse of absolute singularity and uniqueness (some going so far as to practice the outbidding of the "uniquely unique") of the Shoah reached its climax (the years 1990-2000), this discourse was clearly shifted in the direction of an ethic with a strong theological coloration whose characteristic was to be refractory to historical and political discussion and criticism (of its philosophical as well as ideological and political presuppositions).

But at the same time, it turned out that this discursive form and the mode of problematization of the singularity of the extermination of the Jews had a strong coloration of political theology - consisting essentially in immunizing the state of Israel against any criticism by making it, by association, a sacred object. According to this mode of enunciation of the singularity of genocide, it merges with the uniqueness (absolute exceptionality) of the Shoah and tends to make it a sacred object (of horror and terror). The state that proclaims itself the heir of the victims and presents itself as the one that repairs the harm inflicted on them becomes in its turn a sacred object and, as such, exempts itself from criticism and is suppose to immunize it against any suspicion of abuse of power (against the Palestinians, notably).

This was the meaning of the discursive operation that was arranged in the decades of the last century around the figure of genocide, focused on the Holocaust (the Shoah). What we are called upon to reflect on today is the huge gap that is growing, in terms of arrangement of the discourses that are called upon to set the tone of present time, between this posture and the one that is emerging today, with the redeployment of the issues condensed around this infinitely powerful and dense word - genocide.

Under the previous regime, the one that will be designated, to go to the essentials, as the Lanzmannian regime, the emphasis is placed on the unspeakable, the indescribable of a capital Crime that resists analysis and description and about which we can only testify - the survivors, direct witnesses and those who testify for the victims, silent witnesses^[1]. The affect that accompanies this gesture is piety: memory tends to become indistinct from worship, any discussion around the Genocide as a historical fact is doomed to become an impiety, even an insanity that will be denounced with vehemence by the guardians of memory. But this fundamentalism of the memory of the incomparable Crime is suspect - it carries in its luggage all kinds of political unspoken. To put it bluntly, in the work of the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann his film to the glory of the Israeli army Tsahal hardly separates itself from the work that constitutes the keystone of the ethical discourse that is jointed with the theology of the Holocaust – the monumental Shoah...

What a contrast between the serious tones and the metaphysical accents, the philosophical intensities that supported this police of statements concerning the Genocide and the current discursive agitation around the question of Xinjiang! Here, it is no longer at all respected and sometimes revered philosophers (Lévinas, Blanchot, Ricoeur...) who set the tone but influencers financed by shady foundations, rogue political adventurers à la Pompeo, professionals of anti-Chinese agitation, journalists in uniform or in livery. At a time when the guardians of memory stood guard in front of the discourse of the Singularity, anyone who suggested that "things" could be said differently or tried to spot the flaws and blind spots of this police of statements was exposed to the risk of being overwhelmed with infamous epithets intended to banish him from discussion^[2]. This is because the Evil with which he was immediately suspected of making a pact was then written with a giant capital letter...

The agitation around the "Uighur genocide", by contrast, does not bother with this heavy metaphysical equipment, it travels light and goes straight to the point: to find the defect of the armor by which could penetrate the poisoned line likely to make the Chinese power falter. In simple terms, it will be said that, in the context of the endless war of the worlds, the lesson-giving West has recently been inflicted by China such a masterful thrashing (in terms of biopolitical efficiency) by China, on the occasion of the Covid 19 pandemic, that it has become urgent and vital for its multiple agencies to organize diversions intended to put back in the saddle the discourse of values and lights of which it would be and will remain the spokesman from his manifest destiny. This is, first and foremost, the vocation and function of the current frantic agitation around the Uighur genocide. Once again, the dissecting of this discursive operation (or ideological campaign, as was said in the time of St. Marx) does not in any way amount to or aim to evade the "problem" that constitutes, in the present, the policy conducted by the Chinese leaders and administration in Xinjiang; it is all but saying: 'move around, there is nothing to see!' There is something to be seen, but this something must be named and denounced under the ordinary conditions of an analytical, critical, genealogical approach - not of this new nihilistic obscurantism, driven by the passion for chaos and supported by the obscure desire for the collapse of the Chinese regime, with all its foreseeable consequences.

What we do see is a campaign of forced assimilation, of neo-colonial style and spirit, a campaign of acculturation that undermines the most intimate of people's lives, in its cultural and religious foundations. One of these "great campaigns" inspired by a brutal, simplistic and hasty "planist" conception of political and governmental action. As such, the campaign underway in Xinjiang would be comparable to that which, during the Cultural Revolution, consisted of sending millions of urban young people, students and high school students in particular, to the countryside. This, even at the time, for the purposes of "re-education", bringing into line and putting to work a youth destined to be ideologically formatted and disciplined to excess. It is the lead hand of a power with a brain made foggy (today) by the vertigo of success and totally inept in its treatment of an issue where the dispute, now become global, around Islam is at stake (and the return of colonial and post-colonial issues of all kinds, not to mention the neo-colonial postures of the West in the context of its present “moral rearmament”).

But to equate this problem (serious, and not close to being settled, with the way things are going and given the way in which the Chinese state bureaucracy handles the bear pavement) with the Soviet Great Terror or the Nazi exterminations, by decree, without references and without argumentation, equipped with the only reference to the Orwellian catch-all 1984 - this is pure nihilism, in the tone of the today's obscurantism.

This is, of course, what is opening the doors of the academic career wide to a generation of ambitious and newly graduated opportunists who have for all academic capital only their irrational hatred of China; young people whose thought leaders are Mike Pompeo and Adrian Zenz, who know nothing of the classical literature on the Soviet and Nazi concentration camp systems; and who, blindly confident in the performative function of propaganda and repetition, have no doubt that by dint of saying that genocide is taking place in Xinjiang and that it is of the same kind as what is commonly subsumed under the names of Auschwitz and Gulag - this mantra will turn into a stainless factual truth; fresh cold war doctors - just as we find everywhere in western countries those third-rate politicians who now specialize in anti-Chinese activism and whose ardent hope is that the Chinese watchdogs take notice of them and make them famous by the same token.

What is striking, when we reflect on the condition of the discourses and the police of the statements in their relation to the fundamental political questions, with the problems of the balance of power, is this: the very close combination between two modalities which, however, should exclude each other; on the one hand, this general rule: what could be called vital statements, those that, in a given configuration, cut out the territory of the true - what presents itself and asserts itself under the regime of the indisputable, immune to criticism. In this regard, to lend, in the past, the flank to the accusation of wanting to "relativize the Shoah", it was the worst thing that could have happened to you in the discursive topography where prevailed the motive of the Uniqueness (the absolute singularity) of the Shoah; the consequence being this intolerant and dogmatic trend of the basic statements that prevail in this configuration.

And then, on the other hand, what clashes head-on with all the presumptions attached to this apodictical modality: a regime of perfect discontinuity – they (the “Uighur genocide” lobby) turn the pages, even they tear them apart and we move on to a new chapter, they just forget, if necessary they erase the traces, but more generally, not even: they move on to something else with a light heart, carelessly. The Genocide had become the vector of an ethical and theological turning point in political philosophy; here it is redeployed, hastily repainted as a "cultural genocide" (but more often than not, they shorten it into genocide anyway), perpetrated by the Chinese totalitarian power, and this time, it is a motley coalition of politicians, journalists and formatted young academics that sticks to it. The logocrats of the present time are moving on to the agenda, always on the breach: today, the priority is to contain and roll back the Chinese power, by all means, fire on the Headquarters! - while Ethics and Emmanuel Levinas' sacred texts are purely and simply rejected to the background.

The notion of genocide has always been exposed to instrumentalization, it goes without saying, but, with the indifference displayed in its elementary sense (genocide: “systematic extermination of a human, national, ethical or religious group" – Larousse dictionary, 2006), a new level has been reached. Unfortunately, those who practice this outbidding of infecting words into political utensils and weapons of war are here in good company: when, on 24 April, Joe Biden officially recognized the Armenian genocide in the name of the United States, it was not the love of the truth or the ardent desire to pay tribute to the victims that inspired him; much more trivially and sinisterly, it was mainly a question of punishing Turkey and its leader Erdogan for certain recent changes in the foreign and military policy of this country, which the United States does not find to its liking.

It is very difficult to imagine anything gloomier than this use of genocide, in the service of the continuation of politics or war... "by other means" (to parody a famous formula).

In a recent interview with a New York Times reporter, Noam Chomsky said: “ Let’s take what’s happening with the Uyghur. Pretty hard to get good evidence, but there’s enough evidence to show that there’s very severe repression going on. Let me ask you a simple question. Is the situation of the Uyghurs, a million people who’ve been through education camps, is that worse than the situation of, say, two million and twice that many people in Gaza? I mean, are the Uyghur having their power plants destroyed, their sewage plants destroyed, subjected to regular bombing? Is it not happening to them? Not to my knowledge. So yes, it shouldn’t be happening. We should protest it. It has one crucial difference from Gaza. Namely, in the Uyghur case, there’s not a lot that we can do about it, unfortunately. In the Gaza case, we can do everything about it since we were responsible for it, we can stop it tomorrow. That’s the difference. OK? So yes, that’s a very bad thing among other bad things in the world. But to say that it’s a threat to us is a little misleading.”^[3].

This, addressed to the American public in the first place, is not badly said at all...

^[1] Claude Lanzmann (1925-2018) was a French filmaker, writer and polemist. His film Shoah was the matrix of the notion of the Holocaust as the Absolute crime.

^[2] I'm not talking here of the repugnant revisionist ( « negationnist ») sect which, notably in France, launched a campaign on the motto « Gas chambers have never existed ». The radical nihilism that inspired this agitation rightfully resulted in the banishment of there people from the field of public discussion on the subject.

^[3] New York Times, 23/04/ 2021. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-noam-chomsky-transcript.html