Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Ready to stop 'eliding'? I doubt it.
I somehow got on the mailing list of an organization called Academia.edu. They send emails linking papers that might be interesting, and some of those papers are actually interesting. Most are standard orthodox crap.
Academia also teases "mentions" of my own name, never exactly quoting the papers, in an effort to stir up a paid subscription. Admittedly I'm curious to see if those "mentions" are really me or another with the same name. Judging by subject, some of them arise from my listing as co-author of acoustics papers when I was working at Penn State.
Academia is sort of like Quora, a pile of toxic shit with occasional precious stones, just enough to keep you digging. Clever.
The latest offering has an intriguing title: Making genocide unthinkable: three guidelines for a critical criminology of genocide. As the word critical implies, it's not really about genocide as such, more about trying to reshape the discipline of criminology to handle genocide better. It was written in 2006, well before the current total universal global genocide, so it can't be contaminated by the latest version of the crime.
The author does try to peel away the standard branding of Hitler's genocide
as the ONLY genocide:
This awareness did not exist immediately following World War 2, but has become ever-present within modern western cultures since the 1970s. Sadly, this heightened awareness has done little to prevent genocides in Iraq, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. As Cohen eloquently posits, 'our touching faith in if only they knew underestimates the willfulness of denial in the face of knowledge'.'If only they knew' is a sharp observation, but "denial" is just another distracting trick. Mass murderers KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THEY'RE DOING. We must recognize that they ENJOY WHAT THEY'RE DOING.
But what about criminology itself? Seldom addressed are the discipline’s foundational blind spots and its history, in Agozino’s words, as an 'imperialist science for the control of others'. This brings us to the need for a non-redemptive criminology of genocide and mass violence. Redemptive narratives are a common theme within the genocide literature. They suggest that, although genocide represents the height of human cruelty, we can nonetheless learn from it and grow morally and intellectually by engaging with this topic. These narratives reflect an attempt to revalorise humanity following its absolute debasement. The existing criminology of genocide often participates in a similar form of revalorisation. Through an investigation of genocide, the most serious of crimes, the goal is to redeem criminology by demonstrating the discipline’s moral and scholarly worth.Well? Now's your chance to demonstrate your worth. You have all the info necessary to start 'revalorizing'.
First, these theories typically ignore broader matters of political, historical and social significance, even when we solely consider their application to street crimes. Second, they locate the motivation for genocide and mass violence primarily within a limited temporal sphere, eliding broader patterns of imperialism, capitalist acquisition and exploitation and their consequences for those who suffer the effects of genocide and mass violence.Well? Time to stop 'eliding' and start focusing on the capitalist and imperialist exploiters. One word, young man. BEZOS. This isn't the only word, but it's a central word. Other five-letter words ending with S also come to mind. GATES and SOROS and BORIS. And a phrase containing Five and ending with S. FIVE EYES.
Labels: #defundpublichealth
¶ 12:08 AM
