‘SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGES OF THOUGHT’: EMPIRE'S INSERTS

Scattered throughout Hardt and Negri's Empire are a number of short sections whose manifesto-like energy contrasts with the relatively expository style of the main text. These passages, modeled after the scholie of Spinoza's Ethics, are meant to suggest new ways of thinking about material already presented, to highlight the affective aspect of the material, and to point to hidden connections among different discursive elements. Several of these which did not appear in the published version of Empire for reasons of space are published here for the first time. The matters touched on are as diverse as those in Empire itself: Totality as a philosophical problem, the gender of biopolitical production, the relationship between genocide and the nationstate, the possibility of hope; the paradoxes of unemployment, the function of fear, postmodern prophecy,Hollywood's imperial fantasy, and the paradoxical relationship between being-against and love that has puzzled and fascinated many of Empire's readers.     

Victims of the Genocidal Mind: Societal Indicators and Individual Case Treatment Considerations

This paper uses the theoretical lens of object relations and takes the position that the paranoid-schizoid position and the related mechanism of projective identification—cornerstone pathology found in the phenomenon of fascism and totalitarianism—are not atypical, but rather live within the seemingly normal individual. Using Rwanda as a case example, the author illustrates the continuum of beliefs and actions that can result in genocide, and then describes some of the treatment considerations facing the clinician dealing with victims of genocide.

Teaching the Holocaust as a Cautionary Tale

Teaching about the Holocaust as an atrocity of the 1940s misleads students into thinking that it is a genocide occurred, that the world agreed “Never Again,” and that the United Nations would prevent future genocides. With genocides in Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Syria occurring in the years since the Holocaust, teachers need to use the Holocaust as a vehicle for teaching about and preventing future genocides. Five main points need to be taught to students, all of which can be shown in the Holocaust and other genocides, specifically: (1) the meaning of genocide and problems surrounding its early identification; (2) the idea that governments are not always ethical or moral; (3) the effectiveness of propaganda; (4) dehumanization; and (5) using one's voice to stand up against injustice.     

The Armenian Lost Cause and the Interpreted History of the American Civil War

Most Americans today believe slavery caused the American Civil War, but adherents of the Lost Cause narrative advance the idea that southerners fought the war for honor, state’s rights, and in defense of their homeland which was invaded by the northerners. A similar Armenian Lost Cause narrative has evolved which centers on the idea that 1.5 million Ottoman-Armenians were killed deliberately and systematically in 1915 during an Armenian Genocide. Moreover, the narrative insists that the Ottoman-Armenians were essentially innocent victims and the Ottoman state, represented in situ by Muslim Turks, killed them for economic and racially prejudiced reasons. Like the Confederate Lost Cause the Armenian Lost Cause mythology has generated an entire literature supporting the narrative and a similar cult-like passion to its orthodoxy. This article compares the construction and effects of Lost Cause narratives and suggests revisions to the Armenian Lost Cause narrative based on the inclusion of authentic archival holdings.     

The displaced and dispossessed of Darfur: explaining the sources of a continuing state-led genocide

The millions of survivors who fled from attacks to Sudanese-controlled displacement camps and the refugee camps in Chad are the living ghosts of the Darfur genocide. The 1948 Genocide Convention incorporates extermination by mass killing and elimination through forced migration as two distinct elements of genocide. Genocide scholars and public discourse emphasize extermination by killing, but they give far less explanatory attention to the elimination processes that the Genocide Convention describes as 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction'. (Article II United Nations 1948.) In Darfur, understanding the latter processes requires theoretical attention to the history of food, water, and famine and detailed methodological attention to temporal processes of displacement. We demonstrate how intentional state-led attacks on food and water massively dislodged Black Africans in Darfur from February 2003 to August 2004. The political leadership of the Sudanese state dehumanized and forcibly displaced Black Africans from their homes in Darfur to camps where they largely remain, not only through mass killings and rapes, but also by destroying life-sustaining access to food and water, leading to the genocidal elimination of group life in this region.