First off, some remarks on terminology.

To avoid unnecessary juridical debate, we propose to speak of mass murders of the 20th century rather than genocide or crimes against humanity. These two last terms have been the object of judicial definitions since after the Second World War; the term “crime against humanity” was defined during the Nuremberg Trials. While it might be interesting to intervene on these judicial debates, this seems to us to not be the most important point for the moment.

The use of the terms “genocides” and “crimes against humanity” leads to interminable debates between those who support the legal definitions in place and those who want to rely on the facts, the latter group divided between those who try to stick to the facts and those who would add their political or ideological interpretation, hoping that the use of a particular term would reinforce the political condemnation.

The Armenian Genocide of 1915 is an example. Speaking of “genocide” means for some that the Turks had planned this massacre, while for others it means less a planned massacre than a consequence of a deportation that the Turkish government had organized for security reasons, Armenians being considered potential allies of the Russian enemy. The question, then, is less to find the best term than to focus on the fact that there was a massacre.

We could hold a similar debate about the massacre of Jews by the Nazis. Does it represent a political decision, taken from the arrival of Nazism in power or does it represent a consequence of the war, the Final Solution not having been but a circumstancial decision taken when the Nazis realized the impossibility to deport all Jews from Germany and German-occupied territories.

In the two cases cited above, the essential fact is that there was a massacre, and a mass-murder at that.

The term “genocide” is still discussed when talking about Israeli policy in regards the Palestinians. Do we confront a deliberate desire to kill or the consequences of the impossibility of guaranteeing the transfer of the Palestinian population out of Israeli territory? We could discuss these questions at length, but the fact remains that the massacres are there; in 1948 to make Palestinians scared and encourage them to leave; and during the invasion of Gaza, to finish off Hamas. These are the justifications that permit Israel's supporters to use the ignominous phrase “collatoral damage”.

The phrase “mass murders” allows us to keep to the facts and to denounce a policy that leads to these facts, repositioning the debate in the political realm. Legal considerations come next.

A look at the history of the 20th century shows how barbaric a century it was, but also how this barbarism – far from showing itself as anthetical to our civilization and culture – developped at the heart of our civilization. This is a point we must demonstrate.

The massacres of Jews put Europe in question. The issue is less a matter of compassion for the murdered Jews than the fact that the murder was committed within Europe, by a nation considered, justly, as one of the beacons of European civilization. This way of thinking allows us to forget what constitutes this barbarism and how it continues to this day.

We can firstly recall that this barbarism already manifested itself in the intra-European massacre of the First World War. How could France and Germany – the beacons of an enlightened Europe – have produced the barbarism of Verdun?

But that massacre did not begin in Europe. We cannot forget the role of colonization and the massacres of indigenous people that accompanied it. Whether a massacre was purposeful or incidental doesn't matter; there was massacre. How did the so-called civilized nations allow these crimes to be committed, crimes such as the massacres of American Indians, the Atlantic slave trade or those which accompanied first the colonial conquests, then the repression of anti-colonial revolts and decolonization movements. In a work on the genesis of Nazi violence, Enzo Traverso reminds us that the history of this violence in the European violence against indigenous people in the colonies. There was, nevertheless, a difference. The colonial massacres were far away and affected the “barbarians” who opposed European civilization; they had little impact on the metropoles who either accepted or ignored them. The Nazi massacres took place in Europe against Europeans, even if the particular inhabitants were considered as foreigners (The Jews allegedly Asians), or sub-humans as the Nazis saw them. That is what Aimé Césaire said in his Discourse on Colonialism when he wrote it.

“What the Christian bourgeoisie of the 20th century cannot forgive Hitler is not the crime itself, the crime against man, nor the human misery itself, but that the crime was committed against the white man... to have applied to Europe the colonial procedures, which until then had only applied to the Arabs, the Coolies of Indian, and the negroes of Africa.”

In discussing the Jews, we should recall as well that by after the Second World War and the massacres of which they were victims, Jews were finally recognized as Europeans; this recognition manifested itself in part as support for the young State of Israel, this bastion of European civilization on barbarian territory. Thus Jews, having been massacred in Europe, became, by way of the creation of the State of Israel, Europe’s little soldiers facing the natives; a means for Europe to free its guilty conscience.

We must also recall, when speaking of Nazism, another massacre of subhumans, that of Roma people, that was as systematic as the massacre of Jews. The erasure of this massacre signifies the way in which Christian thought remains anchored, in spite of its secularization, in European thinking. European anti-Semitism, even if distinct, followed Christian anti-Judaism and Jews remained, up until the Second World War, foreigners in Europe. The proclaimed compassion for Jews is not extended to the Roma who remain, to this day, the pariahs of Europe. It is true that the Roma are already Christian and that the poor regard in which they are held is not related to theology; it is in this way that their massacre does not have the same value, in European eyes, as the massacre of the Jews.

We must speak also of other mass-merders have taken place since the end of the Second World War. Note here the two expressions, First and Second World War. For Europeans, these wars are called ‘World Wars’ because they were pan-European, even if the Second took place on the entirety of the globe with the American-Japanese conflict. Yet between the two official wars, the Franco-German War of 1870 and the First World War starting in 1914, France carried out a permanent war to construct its colonial empire. As we already remarked, these military adventures, because they happened far away and did not affect the national territory, were not seen as as wars even if they caused the wholesale destruction of societies of the colonized. Moreover, after the Second World War, France remained at war for close to another twenty years against liberation movements in Vietnam and the North Africa.

Can one say that the Armistice of May 8th, 1945 began an era of peace in the world? Independent of the Cold War - that pitted off the two new great powers and remained cold insomuch as the armaments of each protagonist was sufficient to prevent the conflict from becoming hot – wars continue to take place from 1945 to our times. These wars are accompanied by massacres that are the perceived differently, depending on the relationships between the powers and the states that commit these massacres. These are condemned or ignored, even denied, in relation to whether those who commit the massacres are enemies or allies, and the condemnations themselves vary in function of shifting alliances. What matters in these conflicts is less people than shifting geopolitical interests. The massacre of Chechens by the Russian Army is denounced or forgotten by the West as a function of Western relations with Russia. We could equally cite the Kurds of Iraq whom Sadam Hussen could massacre with impunity so long as he was an ally of the West and whose elimination did not interest the West until Iraq became an enemy. We should note also that this selective judgement towards massacres and oppression is not exclusive to the West. We see it today with Darfur, whose residents are massacred by the Sudanese army and militias; here it's the West who denounces the massacres. Bu this denunciation itself is biased as it appears to be less a support for the massacred in Darfur than a weapon of the war between North and South. We revisit the work of Jean Ziegler, The Hatred of the West, of which a reading summary is in the appendix of this text.

I don’t think that our role is to offer an overview of the great crimes of humanity, but rather to show the historical logic of these crimes. But, and this is one point that seems among the most important, our purpose is also to show how a perverted form of memory, that which is often called “the duty to remember” leads to chosing from these massacres for purely ideological reasons, to construct a scale for horror that cannot but reinforce that which we call victims' competition.

We cannot summarize this competition among victims better than by citing the statement of Israeli academic Yehuda Elkana, director of the Institute for the History of Science and Ideas of the University of Tel-Aviv:

“From Auschwitz came, symbolically, two peoples: a minority that proclaims this will never happen again and a scared and anxious majority who proclaims that this will never happen to us again.”

Thus the two conceptions confront each other, that of condemning a crime against humanity within a universal vision and that of the denunciation of a crime against a human group, that can only lead to competition between victims.

It's the first concept that must guide us.

Appendix: Jean Ziegler, The Hate of the West, Albin Michel, Paris 2008.

In the 1950's, colonized peoples reminded the colonizers that the struggle against colonialism followed in the tradition of the Enlightenment and Human Rights that the colonizers had violated. It is in there that we can read The Discourse on Colonialism of Aime Cesaire or the texts of Franz Fanon. Fifty years later, the formerly colonized denounce in the human-rights ideology a form of imperialism and put back into question its universal reach. What has happened that has facilitated such a transformation? It is this question that Jean Ziegler addresses in his most recent work with the suggestive title: The Hatred of the West, this hatred being directed with no discernment to all who come to the West.

Ziegler starts with an anecdote. As ranking functionary of the UN, the author is participating in a meeting about the responsibilities of the Sudanese dictator in the massacres of Darfur. After the meeting, Ziegler listened to the Sri Lankan representative express his anger against the European Union's representatives who proposed a resolution against the Islamist regime in Sudan; the issue being less Darfur as the arrogance towards the people of the South on the part of those who forget the crimes they have themselves committed.

Another equally significant anecdote. In November 2006, the Israeli army bombed Beit Hanoun, a Palestinian village in the north of the Gaza Strip, killing nineteen people. The Human Rights Commission of the UN decided to send an international commission of inquiry to Gaza. Refused entry by Israel, the commission did not go to Gaza and there was no inquiry. The EU's representatives do not make a fuss. In December of the same year, the Human Rights Commission decided to send a commission of enquiry to Darfur. Sudan opposed it, and the commission was blocked. The reason given by Sudan: if Israel refuses a commission of inquiry, why must Sudan accept one? This time the EU representatives protested the Sudanese attitude.

We can continue for a long time, the West is ready to condemn crimes committed by Southern states but refuses the condemnation of crimes committed by those on its side. We understand, therefore, why and how a hatred of the West developped and it is this hatred that Ziegler's work proposes to explain. As Antonio Guttierez, UN High Commissioner for Refuggees, puts it, “It’s the bill for Palestine and Iraq coming due”.

The false universalism of the West plays out at two levels, the human rights discourse on the one hand and the violence of global domination manifested in colonization and capitalist globalization on the other hand. The human rights discourse disappears behind the violence and this is what provokes the hate. Ziegler distinguishes two forms of hate, a pathological hatred like that demonstrated by the attacks of September 11th and the nebulous Al-Qaida, and a reasoned hatred that is the political response to the claims of the West. But is the West able to distinguish these two types of hatred? This is the question one should ask while reading this work.

Among the reasons that have led to this hatred are “the return of memory” and “the identitarian affirmation”. The Western universalist claims lead to making distinctions between memories and effacing the many memories of the victims of Western oppression. To understand this return of memory and this identitarian affirmation of the victims of the West, Ziegler revisits one of the biggest events of the 1950's, the Bandung Conference, one of the great moments of expression for the countries of the South. The Bandung conference marked the drsire of the countries of the South to existe in the face of Western pretense, a desire for political existence but also a desire for cultural existence. “The Western oppressor was contested in the name of historical memory, identities, and the singularities of the cultures of the people of the South” wrote Ziegler.

Two forms of this oppression are recalled by the author, slavery and colonial conquest.

We must not forget that the Atlantic slave-trade is one of the biggest crimes against humanity. While some Europeans were aware of this crime, they were confronted by the economic interests of those profited from it. The human rights revolutions, the American and French that mark the second half of the 18th Century, did not put an end to the practice of slavery. The founding fathers of American democracy accepted slavery and even though the French revolutions put an end to slavery in 1794, Bonaparte reestablished it in 1802, adding ferocious repression toward those who attempted to resist it.

Colonial conquest was not only guided by the quest for economic and political subjugation, it also involved the destruction of cultures in the name of the supremacy of Western culture; in this it expressed racism. Ziegler next recalls some of the crimes committed by the two great colonial powers, France and Great Britain.

We therefore shouldn’t be surprised by the reactions of the global conference against racism which took place in Durban in 2001, reactions that translated into demands for apologies and compensation for Western crimes. The conference took place in two paralels, a first conference open to more than three thousand non-governmental social movements and organizations coming from the five continents and a second conference reserved for the Heads of State. From the first conference, the representative of African NGO's Aloune Tine proclaimed: “We demand that slavery and colonialism be recognized as a double holocaust and crime against humanity” and that the Heads of State conference accept these demands. The Western delegations supported neither the idea of reparative justice nor the demands for repentance, and the American delegation left the conference. This Western Autism can only reinforce hatred.

However, the demand for justice gains in force even as Western hegemony is still pressing, as we are reminded by the daily news. The question cannot be resolved by a simple apology for the past while oppression continues under globalization, as Ziegler explains in the second part of his work. The author distinguishes four moments of Western hegemony: first, the conquests of the period that we call the great discoveries, then the period of triangular trade that accompanied the slave trade, followed by the installation of the colonial system, and finally the current order of globalized Western capital. The author develops two examples to illustrate the violence exercised by the West against the countries of the South, the destruction of the African cotton market and the blackmail of the European Union that imposed a new economic partnership agreement on the peoples of the ACP (Africa, Carribean, and Pacific).

It is true that powerful financial oligarchies have developped in the South, but this development – copying the Western model – does not contribute to the development of the countries concerned. At most it allows the development of an oligarchy along the Western model while the great majority of the populations live in misery and exploitation, as the Indian and Chinese models demonstrate. While competing, the oligarchies, be they Indian, Chinese, or Western, are united in contributing to the development of globalized capitalism and to the exploitation of the populations of the South , which can only reinforce a hatred of the West.

What does the Declaration of Human Rights do in this story? All the more a lure as the author shows. The West, so outraged when human rights are violated in the countries of the South, watch with equanimity when these same rights are violated in their own countries or those of their friends. We therefore understand that human rights can be considered by some as a tool of the West's war. We can see there the extreme outcome of hatred of the West, but this outcome, also debatable itself, is first and foremost a result of the Western wrongs towards the South.

Far from being a Manichean work picking up the classic discourse of too many white people's self-flagellation, Ziegler's work, in analysing the hegemonic desires of Western powers and the wrongful behaviour towards the countries of the South, can lead the reader to understand how the hatred of the West came to be, the first step towards learning to resist this politics of domination, to also learn how much it is necessary to let the lit face of Western thought speak before it's too late.