“We’re hardwired for love. We are taught to do violence, and to hate.” — Dana Mashoian Walrath
A couple of months ago in Warsaw, the Polish writer and Jewish activist Konstanty Gebert argued that Gaza wasn’t a genocide. Today’s guest disagrees. In The Book of Genocides, graphic artist and anthropologist Dana Mashoian Walrath draws ten genocides including what she sees as the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.
So what, exactly, is a “genocide”? Walrath’s definition borrows from the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term during the Second World War. Lemkin meant the word to mean the destruction of peoples that had been deemed sub-human. Thus Walrath includes crimes against the First Peoples of the Americas and Black Americans alongside 20th-century mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia, where her ancestors were persecuted.
Some will quibble over this list. Although quibbling over the top (or bottom) ten genocides isn’t exactly good taste. Besides, The Book of Genocides is a poignant work of graphic art in the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And its author, for all her anthropological insights into why people commit crimes against humanity, isn’t shy with her genocide jokes. Springtime for Hitler, anyone?
