The word “genocide”, though coined in 1943 by Rafael Lemkin to describe the hitherto unimaginable or indescribable horrors of the Holocaust, properly entered the British consciousness on March 27, 1974, when the 20th episode of the BBC history series, The World at War, was broadcast. The episode was called “Genocide”, and it dealt with the foundation of the SS and the Final Solution. I would say that it was with this episode that the reality of what had happened was made unignorably apparent to the millions who had been tuning into the programme for week after week. It certainly entered my consciousness, and the memory of that is one of the reasons I write for this publication.
By a curious coincidence, the word grabbed the nation’s attention again a couple of months and a bit later, when David Bowie shouted, at the beginning of his song Diamond Dogs: “this ain’t rock and roll, this is genocide!” Golly, I remember thinking when I first heard this, that’s a bit strong. However, as the song that followed these words most definitely was rock and roll, no one took Bowie’s spoken remarks literally, and it was generally passed off as nothing more than an unusually ambitious example of rock and roll bravado in an industry which thrived on it. It would also help provoke a major reset of Bowie’s self-made image a couple of years later, when, his mind warped by excessive amounts of fame and drugs, he started talking approvingly about dictators and giving Hitler salutes. There was an outcry, and he got his act together, so to speak, thank goodness.
The word resurfaced in 1994 because of Rwanda and Bosnia. Google Ngram, which tracks the occurrence of words throughout their use from all available sources since 1500, shows the word’s usage rise sharply around then, spiking around 2000 and then falling off abruptly again before 2023, the last year for which Google has collected data.
Oh, balmy days before October 7 of that year! For the word is now everywhere, and I don’t think it would be outrageous to guess that 95 per cent of the time it is used to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, with the remaining five per cent coming from people saying either “but it isn’t genocide” or “but that’s what Hamas’s founding charter called for,” etc.
Personally speaking, I was first pulled up by this word in April 2024, while reading an essay about culture by the eminent literary critic, Terry Eagleton, in the house journal of the British intelligentsia, The London Review of Books. I tend to read Eagleton’s essays when I find them, for he can be an entertaining and thought-provoking writer, even though he can sometimes let his passions – socialism, class struggle and Catholicism, Irish independence – barge into his arguments in a way which, shall we say, disrupts their flow somewhat.
As happened in his essay “Where does culture come from?” Talking about the rise of industrial capitalism and the rift “between the symbolic realm and the world of utility” I came across this sentence: “One of these endangered values is the creative imagination, which was invented in the late 18th century and is nowadays revered among artistic types, though organising genocide in Gaza requires quite a lot of it too.”
Eh? I have since tried to parse that sentence, although I tend to stop short of fully examining its implications, for they are distressing; and it was distressing enough to be pulled up short by the use of the g-word, coming as it did in the pages of the most seriously academic of journals, and from one of its most seriously respected contributors. One watches one’s words when one writes for the LRB, just as keenly as they watch the words of those who write for them. So that’s it, I thought: the Academy has fallen.
Since then, I have become wary of opening each latest issue of the magazine (I subscribe; for a book reviewer, it’s indispensable), as wary as I am of opening an income tax demand, for it began to seem that every fortnight there would be, in passing or otherwise, a reference to the alleged crimes of Israel, particularly after October 7, with little, if any, acknowledgement that the state’s actions might have been provoked by something.
Since then, the g-word is now everywhere; and, among those who protest on behalf of the Palestinians in general and Gazans in particular, it is a shibboleth: you have to say it, or risk ostracism. Say it is not genocide – even if you provide robust legal analysis and so on – and you become labelled a “genocide denier”, a term which deliberately echoes, and therefore somehow annihilates, the term “Holocaust denier”, once considered the lowest of the low among those expressing an opinion on the matter.
So now, among the placards of the young and old, at each concert appearance by Bob Vylan or the Irish rap group Kneecap, each pronouncement from Roger Waters and the like, and the way that the word has now been appropriated, I think: “this isn’t genocide, this is rock and roll.”
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