Anyone who has read my blog knows that I discuss a wide variety of topics, from shamanism to jazz to genocide. One key concern I have been focused on is that between discourse and practice, word and object, meaning and world.
Definition is about constituting sets, discerning the characteristics that typify a set of objects, actions, qualities, or relations (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions) and that distinguish that set from others. It is also about mediating language and world.
Intuitively, there are two obvious and opposed approaches to take in defining sets. One is to look first to the world, to describe the qualities of things, actions, relationships. Sets are defined by things sharing similar qualities. This seems a thoroughly empirical approach, though a key problem is that it’s hard to know a priori whether we’re identifying a meaningful or useful set via this approach. Things in the world have myriad qualities, and whether we’re aware or not of it we’re making interpretive choices about which qualities to focus on – which is fine if done critically. In his 1959 critique of anthropology up to that point, “Rethinking Anthropology,” Edmund Leach called upon anthropology to move beyond a “butterfly collecting” approach, where social characteristics such as matrilineal matrilocal complexes or patrivirilocality were collected and assumed meaningful. Leach’s point wasn’t that such descriptions weren’t necessarily meaningful or important but that anthropologists should think much more critically about whether, how, and why such descriptions defined sets.
The opposing approach is to start with language independent of the world (insofar as one can do that – clearly language is always a thing of the world), define a set abstractly and then look to the world to see what fits and what doesn’t. Although he’s not explicit on the point, when Wynton Marsalis says that jazz just went away for a little while in the 1970s (despite the huge success of fusion during that period) he seems to be applying an a priori definition of “jazz” which doesn’t include fusion, thus allowing him to make the claim (See my discussion in “Miles Davis’ Ferrari, or Popularity and Art”). This is an approach to defining sets that always “works,” though the key problem here is that there’s no guarantee that our definitions and sets reflect important empirical relationships between things in the world.
My preference is for a pragmatic approach that stays grounded in empirical observation but with a willingness to open up the empirical to interpretation and exploration by casting it in multiple possible comparative frames and tacking back and forth between observation of the world and abstract definition.
Generally, a good starting point is language as practice, looking at how language is manifested as a thing in the world and how it is used to relate to non-linguistic things in the world. That is, it’s useful to start by looking at how a word is used, looking to see what objects (I use “object” here in the semiotic sense – the “object” could be an object or thing in the vernacular sense, or an action, quality, or relationship) are referred to with it, then to focus on their qualities to abstract a sense of what defines the set – with a willingness then to potentially extend the category to other things sharing in those defining qualities. Some argue that the category “shaman” should be restricted in anthropological analysis to the Siberian contexts in which it was first identified and from which the term comes. I disagree, both because the term has long since escaped that restricted reference in its real usage and more importantly because the quality that defines shamanism in those Siberian contexts is not “Siberian-ness” (after all, what make a shaman a shaman in Siberia cannot be being of Siberia), and the application of the term to a variety of other contexts has been useful in noting important similarities in ritual and spiritual practices in a variety of world settings. (See my earlier post “Shamanism, Fascism, Gulags, and Genocide.”)
A pragmatic approach does not expect that any one quality will be the skeleton key to define the essence of the category, expecting instead as Wittgenstein pointed out that categories will be defined not by single qualities but by overlapping sets of family resemblances. The music of Louis Armstrong and Mahavishnu Orchestra really don’t have much apparent similarity that they should belong to the same set: “jazz.” But both have definite similarities to other music that resembles other music that ultimately connect the two.
Nor does a pragmatic approach assume that any object, practice, action, etc., will fit into only one important set. I regularly teach a course titled “Peoples and Cultures of the World.” When I cover the Sudanic region of Sub-Saharan Africa, a topic that often arises for discussion, sometimes raised by me, sometimes by one of the students, is that of the practice that is variously termed “female genital mutilation,” “female genital modification,” “female genital operation,” etc. The multiplicity of terms indicates the multiplicity of meaning associated with the practice. I try to emphasize to my students that no one of these terms is “wrong” or “right,” but that the choice of term actively shapes our understanding of the category. I further raise a variety of other possible categories, such as “body modification” to indicate that the same practice meaningfully belongs to multiple sets or categories simultaneously. (See my earlier discussion in “Sudan and Cultural Relativism” and “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?”)
Finally, another advantage of a flexible, pragmatic approach to definition is that it allows sets to evolve. When Marsalis says that jazz “went away,” he not only seems to have an a priori sense of what jazz “is” but the mode of defining also creates a static category which excludes things such as fusion which have strayed too far. It is legitimate to ask how much something can evolve and change and remain part of the original category (and there are no easy answers here). An example from paleoanthropology would perhaps be illustrative. Though there is some debate on the point, two hominid species that are probably our evolutionary ancestors are Homo erectus and Australopithecus afarensis. These are species that still have living descendants – us – so they never went extinct in the same way that hominid species like Australopithecus boisei or Australopithecus robustus – which have no living descendants – did. But though H. Erectus and A. afarensis never went extinct, they are extinct – we evolved from them, but are now something distinct from them. If Marsalis or anyone else claimed that fusion was an evolution from jazz that was no longer jazz, I think I’d disagree, but I could see that point. Still, you’d then have to say that in the 1970s jazz was largely replaced by something that evolved from jazz but was no longer jazz if you wanted to be faithful to the facts.
A flexible approach to definition does not mean that “Anything Goes.”
I do think it’s useful to stretch the category “shamanism” beyond Siberia to apply to a variety of ritual and spiritual practices whereby a practitioner enters an altered state of consciousness and engages in interaction with a variety of supernatural entities, often by voyaging beyond the body. I am equally opposed to stretching the category further to include any practice involving altered states of consciousness, or even simply other ritual and/or spiritual practices involving altered states, such as spirit mediumship. Such an extension waters down the important recognition of similarities in an entire suite of characteristics in Siberian and Native American shamanisms by including a variety of other much less similar phenomena. It might be useful to have a single more general category for anthropological analysis that includes shamans, spirit mediums and any other practices of spiritual altered state (so far as I know, no such general category exists), but calling spirit mediums shamans or vice versa is not analytically useful.
In my previous post, I argued that “Jazz is not America’s Classical Music,” that jazz and classical are distinct musical idioms. Granted, neither is easy to define, though there are loose sets of characteristics that tend to define each. Also, some music is ambiguous in its fit into either category, but the ambiguity of fit for a particular musical example doesn’t mean that the general category is unreal or useless.
Finally, some phenomena are so important and are really so qualitatively distinct from other phenomena that we should be extremely careful in the use of the words we use to refer to them. I have in mind here words like “genocide,” “Holocaust,” “gulag,” or “fascism,” and the historical (and contemporary in the case of “genocide”) phenomena referred to by them. To use just one example, to critique the prison at Guantanamo is fine and important. To compare it to the Soviet gulag system is also fine – the fact that there might be any systematic similarity at all, even if minor in scope is troubling. To call Guantanamo “the American Gulag” implies an empirical parallel belied by the facts and undermines one’s own credibility and the seriousness of both the Soviet Gulag and of Guantanamo now. (See my earlier post “Shamanism, Fascism, Gulags, and Genocide.”)
Showing posts with label Gulag. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gulag. Show all posts
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Friday, April 20, 2007
Shamanism, Fascism, Gulags, and Genocide
In lieu of the pragmatic or moral possibility of subjecting human culture and history to controlled laboratory examination, a comparative approach is one of our most important tools in attempting to come to an understanding of human experience and practices across historical and cultural contexts. One powerful and often useful way to do this involves the extension of words and concepts originally relating to one historical or cultural context to other settings where we find phenomena that are qualitatively similar in some essential way.
Shamanism, Taboo, Machismo
In the discipline of anthropology, there is a long history of theorizing and understanding cultural contexts in terms of concepts developed within the cultural context in question, but also of extending some of these concepts to apply them to other cultural settings as well. Some important examples include the extension of “shamanism,” “taboo,” and “machismo” to theorize a variety of cultural settings. (Other examples could include “fetishism,” “swidden,” or the use of vernacular English terms to understand similar phenomena in other cultures, e.g. the emphasis on “face” with regard to East Asian cultures, or “honor” and “shame” to conceptualize Circum-Mediterranean cultures.)
“Shamanism” is a word originating with Siberian languages, but has been applied to a variety of religious or spiritual phenomena involving individuals entering into trance or other altered states to interact with the supernatural world in a wide variety of Native American contexts, as well as with regard to cultural contexts in a number of Old World settings outside Siberia. “Taboo” is a term originating in Polynesia. Like “shamanism” it has been extended to a wide number of cultural and historical settings in reference to a variety of sorts of sacred prohibitions. “Machismo” is possibly a bit different in that there is some debate about whether the term originated in Spanish speaking contexts or was introduced to Spanish speaking contexts originally by anthropologists such as Oscar Lewis in reference to patterns of masculine behavior in Latin American contexts like Mexico. In any case, like “Shamanism” and “taboo,” it has been extended to refer to masculine practice and traits, especially characteristics such as intransigence, in a number of settings, though mainly in Latin America and to a lesser extent the Mediterranean region (mainly Spain, to a lesser extent Italy or the Balkans – not so much North Africa).
Each of these terms can be useful in indicating cross-cultural similarity, when used carefully. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that extension of terms can water down the specificity of the particular contexts in question. Extending “shamanism” to discuss non-Siberian cultures can potentially involve losing sight of the particularities of Siberian shamanism, though there’s no reason why an attention to detail cannot also be incorporated into cross-cultural comparison.
To me, the utility of such terms for comparative work depends on careful and consistent attention to issues of qualitative similarity. Each of these three concepts can be used problematically when this is not the case. Siberian and Native American individuals who enter altered states of consciousness to magically heal (or harm) other individuals or interact with a variety of spirits are engaging in different experiences, but experiences that are qualitatively similar in essential ways. Lamas in Tibetan area cultures who engage in ritual practice beseeching gods to intervene against demons and evil spirits, and who may or may not enter a sort of trance state when doing so, are engaging in experiences and practices that are similar in some ways, but less systematically similar – and hence it’s less clear that referring to lamas as “shamans” is a useful thing to do. (Comparing the Siberian and Native American examples is not comparing apples and oranges, but more like comparing different varieties of apples. Comparing lamas and Siberian shamans might be more like comparing apples and oranges – which do at least in fact have a good deal of similarity in both being fruits.) There seems to me a world of difference in the practices of Jívaro shamans in Ecuador, as described by Michael Harner in his 1970s era ethnography The Jívaro, and the sort of “shamanism” taught today by Michael Harner to New Age spiritualists (which seems to me more like comparing apples and collard greens).
“Taboo” seems to me to be stretched thin, rather than usefully extended, when inconsistently applied, not just to examples of sacred prohibition, but to proscription in general (an extension that’s also unnecessary in that there’s already a word for that – “proscription”). The main problem I have with much anthropological use of “machismo” is not the set of characteristics and practices of masculinity it is often associated with, but the often inconsistent manner of its application. In practice it is generally applied to Spanish speaking cultural contexts, and occasionally to other Latin American or European Mediterranean settings, only rarely to other settings. Which would be fine, except that to be conceptualized broadly enough to incorporate the diverse array of Latin American and Mediterranean practices of masculinity, it could easily be applied to a variety of other settings as well, though this is generally not done. In other words, “machismo” could be usefully extended to compare Latin American, North American and European masculinity (and probably other settings as well) on analogy with the extension of “taboo” or “shamanism,” but in practice is problematically used to over-delineate “Latin American” difference through the lack of extension.
Fascism, Gulags, Genocide
There are other concepts that I would argue should be carefully restricted to a limited number of settings. Most prominent among these are “fascism,” “gulag,” and “genocide.” I argue that these terms ideally should be restricted to a limited set of historical circumstances on practical and moral grounds. Practically, these are very serious topics which require careful delineation. This is especially the case with “genocide,” where in the case of ongoing or potential future cases, being able to make fine distinctions contributing to subtle understanding may be important in intervention to stop it. Further, these in fact are fairly unique phenomena – the degree of qualitative similarity is limited. Morally, these are terms that refer to some of the most serious and egregious violations of human rights and dignity in human history. Comparison with other historical contexts can be quite useful, but careless extension of the terms themselves, such as with George W. Bush’s use of the term “Islamofascism” or Amnesty International’s “American Gulag,” both undermines the credibility of the speaker and makes a mockery of the seriousness of the original contexts.
Fascism
Fascism was a form of authoritarian populism, but not all authoritarian populism (much less anything that is vaguely “authoritarian”) is fascism. “Fascism” should be used to speak of political and social phenomena of the 1930s and 1940s, specifically of German Nazism and Italian fascism and related fascist movements in other countries at the time. (I don’t strongly object to use of the term to refer to contemporary neo-Nazis or other neo-fascists who take specific inspiration from the original fascists, though I do think it generally a good idea to use the “neo-” prefix for such cases.) There are a number of features that make German Nazism and Italian fascism quite distinct from other phenomena.
Fascism was not just authoritarian but totalitarian, aiming toward total identity between state and society and total control and transformation of every aspect of society, with this more clearly achieved in the case of Nazi Germany than fascist Italy. Fascism is not the only example of totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt’s classic book on the subject, The Origins of Totalitarianism, describes Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin as the two main cases of actually existing totalitarianism, to which could probably be added the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge), but totalitarianism is a key feature of fascism.
Fascism also involved mass mobilization of people as part of the total identity between state and the populace, a sort of fetishization of technology, and use of mass media and spectacle (where in the case of mass mobilization, the people formed the very spectacle that they were to behold). Involved also with this was a paradoxical or contradictory simultaneous appeal to modernity and the primitive – an identification of state and nation with the might of modern technology and with blood, soil, and family. Alongside this, fascism promised a total social transformation, as did totalitarian communism, but unlike communism, this involved a conservative revolutionary transformation to restore an earlier ideal state of being (which included a romanticization of rural life, blood and race [especially for the Nazis], the Roman Empire [especially for the Italian fascists, but with Nazis also using much Roman imagery], and non- or pre-Christian folklore and mythos [e.g. the uses to which the composers Wagner and Orff were put in Germany]). In all of this fascism was relentlessly nationalist.
Fascism is essentially characterized by this suite of characteristics, and not just any one of them. Useful insights can be gained by comparing Italian fascism and/or Nazi Germany with other political or social systems, but little is gained by extending the term “fascism” in facile ways to contexts that have only a little in common with these cases, especially given that we have ready access to a variety of more usefully generalizable terms, such as “authoritarianism,” “populism,” “nationalism,” or even “totalitarianism.”
Finally, fascism is indelibly linked to not just any old set of historical and cultural contexts but to the destruction of much of Europe during World War II and to the Holocaust in the case of German Nazism. The seriousness of this to me makes any attempt to apply the term to other settings facile at best, distorting the reality of both contexts under comparison.
The Gulag
A few years ago, Amnesty International aroused a small controversy by referring to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay housing “enemy combatants” as an “American Gulag.” (This is a phrase that has subsequently repeated by others. For example, in a recent column in The Nation [“Here Comes Another ‘Crime Wave,’” April 2, 2007, p. 9], Alexander Cockburn repeats the phrase, though in this case it’s not clear whether he’s referring to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, arbitrary violent action against Iraqi civilians, or the American prison system within the U.S.) The characterization struck many as absurd and offensive, the most unfortunate consequence of which was that it undermined the credibility of Amnesty International’s report on Guantanamo, with the result that little attention was paid to the important facts and findings reported there.
Pragmatically, it seems foolish to carelessly throw about terms such as “gulag,” “fascism,” or “genocide.” Because these are highly loaded terms, the extension of them to a variety of contexts has the rhetorical effect of undermining one’s seriousness and credibility for many audiences. As with “fascism,” “gulag” is a term associated with one of the most egregious and systematic violations of human dignity and human rights in history – to glibly refer to other things as “gulags” is to diminish the seriousness of the original context.
There are vast qualitative and quantitative differences between the Soviet Gulag (especially under Stalin, but also earlier and later) and Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib that make the use of the phrase “American Gulag” simply inaccurate or misleading.
The Gulag interred millions, as opposed to hundreds (or a few thousands, perhaps, if you combine detention centers in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan). That is, there are several orders of magnitude difference in the scale of the systems.
In addition to many differences of detail, there are at least two major qualitative differences that make the Soviet Gulag system quite distinct from the “American Gulag.” First, the Soviet Gulag was not just a system of imprisonment but also a slave labor system, while there’s no current evidence I’m aware of for anything of the sort in the cases of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or CIA “black sites.” Second, the Gulag was an integral (and legal) part of the Soviet system overall, which focused especially on citizens who were counter-revolutionary, subversive, enemies of the states, or somehow ran afoul of Stalinist paranoia. Guantanamo is explicitly external to the normal American justice system. Even the Bush Administration recognizes the abnormality and specialness of it, arguing repeatedly, for example, that normal U.S. laws do not apply because internees are non-citizens detained while not follow Geneva Convention rules of warfare and because Guantanamo is not U.S. but foreign soil (an element of the argument I’m sure Fidel Castro finds interesting).
At the same time, I don’t want at all to diminish the seriousness of Guantanamo (or any similar sites). There are troubling commonalities between it and the Gulag, such as detention incommunicado, detention without hope of normal legal proceedings, no clear evidence of offense in many cases, etc. The fact that there are any similarities is quite disturbing, though Amnesty International could have more credibly pointed this out, and even made comparisons between the contexts, if they had done so without attempting to claim equivalency (an equivalency denied by the serious quantitative and qualitative differences) by the use of the “American Gulag” phrase.
Genocide
“Genocide” is different in one way from “fascism” or “gulag.” Those two terms arose in a specific context, contexts that I argue they should be restricted to in their application. “Genocide” is a term applied externally to any number of settings. So, I wouldn’t claim that it should be restricted to only one or another context, but I would argue that “genocide” should be used very carefully in reference to specific sorts of cases.
Cases like the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide are of such seriousness that haphazard use of “genocide” can distort reality, undermine credibility, and needlessly cause offense. Further, for those interested in understanding historical events in subtle ways, accurate use of terminology is essential. For ongoing instances, this is even more crucial – any intervention that anyone might care to get around to in a place like Darfur depends in part on accurate and nuanced understanding to have any hope of success.
Genocide means the attempt to eliminate an ethnic or cultural group. There can be some room for debate about potential application of this term versus another for a specific context. For example, I wouldn’t generally refer to the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs against Bosniak Muslims as genocide. The overall goal in that instance seems to have been the laying claim to certain territory for Serbs and the movement of Bosniaks out of these areas – but not so much to eliminate the cultural group altogether. Note that I’m not saying that this constitutes anything less serious than genocide (thousands were massacred at sites like Srebrenica) – I just think it constitutes something a bit different from genocide. At the same time, I’m also aware that good arguments could be made considering this instance “genocide,” as the U.N.’s tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia has done. Certainly the effects at Srebrenica were “genocidal.” I’m generally opposed to defining “genocide” in terms of effects, because in ongoing situations, defining by effect would mean waiting until after the fact to be able to label something “genocide,” though I can see the merit in doing so for historical instances.
While there is room for debate about whether cases like the Bosnian one constitute “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” or something else altogether but equally serious, “genocide” should not be extended to refer to simply any instance of ethnic tension or violence. For example, last summer I heard someone who was upset about Israeli bombings in areas of southern Lebanon (a reaction I could understand) refer to the Israeli actions as genocide. My reaction was that no matter one’s feelings on that small war last summer (whether one feels that Israel was engaged in an illegitimate action that resulted in serious human rights violations; that Israel did nothing improper at all; that Israel should have hit Hezbollah harder while simultaneously trying to more effectively diminish civilian casualties; that Israel’s actions were proper but disproportionate), one thing that wasn’t happening there was “genocide.” (There are, of course, other problematic uses of the word, e.g. the Ethiopian government’s labeling of opposition politicians, activists, and journalists as guilty of genocide.) The cursory extension of the term to cases such as these is facile and counter-productive at best, both undermining the credibility of the speaker and the seriousness of the concept.
Shamanism, Taboo, Machismo
In the discipline of anthropology, there is a long history of theorizing and understanding cultural contexts in terms of concepts developed within the cultural context in question, but also of extending some of these concepts to apply them to other cultural settings as well. Some important examples include the extension of “shamanism,” “taboo,” and “machismo” to theorize a variety of cultural settings. (Other examples could include “fetishism,” “swidden,” or the use of vernacular English terms to understand similar phenomena in other cultures, e.g. the emphasis on “face” with regard to East Asian cultures, or “honor” and “shame” to conceptualize Circum-Mediterranean cultures.)
“Shamanism” is a word originating with Siberian languages, but has been applied to a variety of religious or spiritual phenomena involving individuals entering into trance or other altered states to interact with the supernatural world in a wide variety of Native American contexts, as well as with regard to cultural contexts in a number of Old World settings outside Siberia. “Taboo” is a term originating in Polynesia. Like “shamanism” it has been extended to a wide number of cultural and historical settings in reference to a variety of sorts of sacred prohibitions. “Machismo” is possibly a bit different in that there is some debate about whether the term originated in Spanish speaking contexts or was introduced to Spanish speaking contexts originally by anthropologists such as Oscar Lewis in reference to patterns of masculine behavior in Latin American contexts like Mexico. In any case, like “Shamanism” and “taboo,” it has been extended to refer to masculine practice and traits, especially characteristics such as intransigence, in a number of settings, though mainly in Latin America and to a lesser extent the Mediterranean region (mainly Spain, to a lesser extent Italy or the Balkans – not so much North Africa).
Each of these terms can be useful in indicating cross-cultural similarity, when used carefully. At the same time, it should be acknowledged that extension of terms can water down the specificity of the particular contexts in question. Extending “shamanism” to discuss non-Siberian cultures can potentially involve losing sight of the particularities of Siberian shamanism, though there’s no reason why an attention to detail cannot also be incorporated into cross-cultural comparison.
To me, the utility of such terms for comparative work depends on careful and consistent attention to issues of qualitative similarity. Each of these three concepts can be used problematically when this is not the case. Siberian and Native American individuals who enter altered states of consciousness to magically heal (or harm) other individuals or interact with a variety of spirits are engaging in different experiences, but experiences that are qualitatively similar in essential ways. Lamas in Tibetan area cultures who engage in ritual practice beseeching gods to intervene against demons and evil spirits, and who may or may not enter a sort of trance state when doing so, are engaging in experiences and practices that are similar in some ways, but less systematically similar – and hence it’s less clear that referring to lamas as “shamans” is a useful thing to do. (Comparing the Siberian and Native American examples is not comparing apples and oranges, but more like comparing different varieties of apples. Comparing lamas and Siberian shamans might be more like comparing apples and oranges – which do at least in fact have a good deal of similarity in both being fruits.) There seems to me a world of difference in the practices of Jívaro shamans in Ecuador, as described by Michael Harner in his 1970s era ethnography The Jívaro, and the sort of “shamanism” taught today by Michael Harner to New Age spiritualists (which seems to me more like comparing apples and collard greens).
“Taboo” seems to me to be stretched thin, rather than usefully extended, when inconsistently applied, not just to examples of sacred prohibition, but to proscription in general (an extension that’s also unnecessary in that there’s already a word for that – “proscription”). The main problem I have with much anthropological use of “machismo” is not the set of characteristics and practices of masculinity it is often associated with, but the often inconsistent manner of its application. In practice it is generally applied to Spanish speaking cultural contexts, and occasionally to other Latin American or European Mediterranean settings, only rarely to other settings. Which would be fine, except that to be conceptualized broadly enough to incorporate the diverse array of Latin American and Mediterranean practices of masculinity, it could easily be applied to a variety of other settings as well, though this is generally not done. In other words, “machismo” could be usefully extended to compare Latin American, North American and European masculinity (and probably other settings as well) on analogy with the extension of “taboo” or “shamanism,” but in practice is problematically used to over-delineate “Latin American” difference through the lack of extension.
Fascism, Gulags, Genocide
There are other concepts that I would argue should be carefully restricted to a limited number of settings. Most prominent among these are “fascism,” “gulag,” and “genocide.” I argue that these terms ideally should be restricted to a limited set of historical circumstances on practical and moral grounds. Practically, these are very serious topics which require careful delineation. This is especially the case with “genocide,” where in the case of ongoing or potential future cases, being able to make fine distinctions contributing to subtle understanding may be important in intervention to stop it. Further, these in fact are fairly unique phenomena – the degree of qualitative similarity is limited. Morally, these are terms that refer to some of the most serious and egregious violations of human rights and dignity in human history. Comparison with other historical contexts can be quite useful, but careless extension of the terms themselves, such as with George W. Bush’s use of the term “Islamofascism” or Amnesty International’s “American Gulag,” both undermines the credibility of the speaker and makes a mockery of the seriousness of the original contexts.
Fascism
Fascism was a form of authoritarian populism, but not all authoritarian populism (much less anything that is vaguely “authoritarian”) is fascism. “Fascism” should be used to speak of political and social phenomena of the 1930s and 1940s, specifically of German Nazism and Italian fascism and related fascist movements in other countries at the time. (I don’t strongly object to use of the term to refer to contemporary neo-Nazis or other neo-fascists who take specific inspiration from the original fascists, though I do think it generally a good idea to use the “neo-” prefix for such cases.) There are a number of features that make German Nazism and Italian fascism quite distinct from other phenomena.
Fascism was not just authoritarian but totalitarian, aiming toward total identity between state and society and total control and transformation of every aspect of society, with this more clearly achieved in the case of Nazi Germany than fascist Italy. Fascism is not the only example of totalitarianism (Hannah Arendt’s classic book on the subject, The Origins of Totalitarianism, describes Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under Stalin as the two main cases of actually existing totalitarianism, to which could probably be added the People’s Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge), but totalitarianism is a key feature of fascism.
Fascism also involved mass mobilization of people as part of the total identity between state and the populace, a sort of fetishization of technology, and use of mass media and spectacle (where in the case of mass mobilization, the people formed the very spectacle that they were to behold). Involved also with this was a paradoxical or contradictory simultaneous appeal to modernity and the primitive – an identification of state and nation with the might of modern technology and with blood, soil, and family. Alongside this, fascism promised a total social transformation, as did totalitarian communism, but unlike communism, this involved a conservative revolutionary transformation to restore an earlier ideal state of being (which included a romanticization of rural life, blood and race [especially for the Nazis], the Roman Empire [especially for the Italian fascists, but with Nazis also using much Roman imagery], and non- or pre-Christian folklore and mythos [e.g. the uses to which the composers Wagner and Orff were put in Germany]). In all of this fascism was relentlessly nationalist.
Fascism is essentially characterized by this suite of characteristics, and not just any one of them. Useful insights can be gained by comparing Italian fascism and/or Nazi Germany with other political or social systems, but little is gained by extending the term “fascism” in facile ways to contexts that have only a little in common with these cases, especially given that we have ready access to a variety of more usefully generalizable terms, such as “authoritarianism,” “populism,” “nationalism,” or even “totalitarianism.”
Finally, fascism is indelibly linked to not just any old set of historical and cultural contexts but to the destruction of much of Europe during World War II and to the Holocaust in the case of German Nazism. The seriousness of this to me makes any attempt to apply the term to other settings facile at best, distorting the reality of both contexts under comparison.
The Gulag
A few years ago, Amnesty International aroused a small controversy by referring to the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay housing “enemy combatants” as an “American Gulag.” (This is a phrase that has subsequently repeated by others. For example, in a recent column in The Nation [“Here Comes Another ‘Crime Wave,’” April 2, 2007, p. 9], Alexander Cockburn repeats the phrase, though in this case it’s not clear whether he’s referring to Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, arbitrary violent action against Iraqi civilians, or the American prison system within the U.S.) The characterization struck many as absurd and offensive, the most unfortunate consequence of which was that it undermined the credibility of Amnesty International’s report on Guantanamo, with the result that little attention was paid to the important facts and findings reported there.
Pragmatically, it seems foolish to carelessly throw about terms such as “gulag,” “fascism,” or “genocide.” Because these are highly loaded terms, the extension of them to a variety of contexts has the rhetorical effect of undermining one’s seriousness and credibility for many audiences. As with “fascism,” “gulag” is a term associated with one of the most egregious and systematic violations of human dignity and human rights in history – to glibly refer to other things as “gulags” is to diminish the seriousness of the original context.
There are vast qualitative and quantitative differences between the Soviet Gulag (especially under Stalin, but also earlier and later) and Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib that make the use of the phrase “American Gulag” simply inaccurate or misleading.
The Gulag interred millions, as opposed to hundreds (or a few thousands, perhaps, if you combine detention centers in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan). That is, there are several orders of magnitude difference in the scale of the systems.
In addition to many differences of detail, there are at least two major qualitative differences that make the Soviet Gulag system quite distinct from the “American Gulag.” First, the Soviet Gulag was not just a system of imprisonment but also a slave labor system, while there’s no current evidence I’m aware of for anything of the sort in the cases of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or CIA “black sites.” Second, the Gulag was an integral (and legal) part of the Soviet system overall, which focused especially on citizens who were counter-revolutionary, subversive, enemies of the states, or somehow ran afoul of Stalinist paranoia. Guantanamo is explicitly external to the normal American justice system. Even the Bush Administration recognizes the abnormality and specialness of it, arguing repeatedly, for example, that normal U.S. laws do not apply because internees are non-citizens detained while not follow Geneva Convention rules of warfare and because Guantanamo is not U.S. but foreign soil (an element of the argument I’m sure Fidel Castro finds interesting).
At the same time, I don’t want at all to diminish the seriousness of Guantanamo (or any similar sites). There are troubling commonalities between it and the Gulag, such as detention incommunicado, detention without hope of normal legal proceedings, no clear evidence of offense in many cases, etc. The fact that there are any similarities is quite disturbing, though Amnesty International could have more credibly pointed this out, and even made comparisons between the contexts, if they had done so without attempting to claim equivalency (an equivalency denied by the serious quantitative and qualitative differences) by the use of the “American Gulag” phrase.
Genocide
“Genocide” is different in one way from “fascism” or “gulag.” Those two terms arose in a specific context, contexts that I argue they should be restricted to in their application. “Genocide” is a term applied externally to any number of settings. So, I wouldn’t claim that it should be restricted to only one or another context, but I would argue that “genocide” should be used very carefully in reference to specific sorts of cases.
Cases like the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide are of such seriousness that haphazard use of “genocide” can distort reality, undermine credibility, and needlessly cause offense. Further, for those interested in understanding historical events in subtle ways, accurate use of terminology is essential. For ongoing instances, this is even more crucial – any intervention that anyone might care to get around to in a place like Darfur depends in part on accurate and nuanced understanding to have any hope of success.
Genocide means the attempt to eliminate an ethnic or cultural group. There can be some room for debate about potential application of this term versus another for a specific context. For example, I wouldn’t generally refer to the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs against Bosniak Muslims as genocide. The overall goal in that instance seems to have been the laying claim to certain territory for Serbs and the movement of Bosniaks out of these areas – but not so much to eliminate the cultural group altogether. Note that I’m not saying that this constitutes anything less serious than genocide (thousands were massacred at sites like Srebrenica) – I just think it constitutes something a bit different from genocide. At the same time, I’m also aware that good arguments could be made considering this instance “genocide,” as the U.N.’s tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia has done. Certainly the effects at Srebrenica were “genocidal.” I’m generally opposed to defining “genocide” in terms of effects, because in ongoing situations, defining by effect would mean waiting until after the fact to be able to label something “genocide,” though I can see the merit in doing so for historical instances.
While there is room for debate about whether cases like the Bosnian one constitute “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” or something else altogether but equally serious, “genocide” should not be extended to refer to simply any instance of ethnic tension or violence. For example, last summer I heard someone who was upset about Israeli bombings in areas of southern Lebanon (a reaction I could understand) refer to the Israeli actions as genocide. My reaction was that no matter one’s feelings on that small war last summer (whether one feels that Israel was engaged in an illegitimate action that resulted in serious human rights violations; that Israel did nothing improper at all; that Israel should have hit Hezbollah harder while simultaneously trying to more effectively diminish civilian casualties; that Israel’s actions were proper but disproportionate), one thing that wasn’t happening there was “genocide.” (There are, of course, other problematic uses of the word, e.g. the Ethiopian government’s labeling of opposition politicians, activists, and journalists as guilty of genocide.) The cursory extension of the term to cases such as these is facile and counter-productive at best, both undermining the credibility of the speaker and the seriousness of the concept.
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