The Holocaust Documentation & Education Center is pleased to share the following program from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University:
Program: “The Problems of Genocide”
Date: Tuesday, May 11, 2021
Time: 3:00 PM
Platform: This program will take place online and is free to the public.
Please note registration is required. Please click here to register.
Speaker: A. Dirk Moses (Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author and editor of books and essays on genocide and intellectual history, and is senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research).
Genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how, as a relatively new idea and law, it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Dirk Moses, in conversation with Frances Tanzer and Taner Akçam, argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the “crime of crimes,” blinds us to other types of civilian death, like bombing cities, and the “collateral damage” of missile and drone strikes. Far from shining a humanitarian light, talk of genocide can function ideologically to detract attention from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. Moses urges us to rethink how we relate the Holocaust to other instances of civilian destruction.
