Chapter Seventeen The Genocide Convention
After this chapter was written, the United States yielded at last to enormous pressure and voted on February 19,1986, for ratification of the Genocide Convention but with seven provisos designed to protect USA sovereignty. Implementing legislation by the House of Representatives would also be needed to give the Convention the effect of law.
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Any study of the Jewish role in 20th century history would be misleadingly incomplete without some reference to the United Nations Genocide Convention, which had its origin in the mind of a Jewish lawyer from Poland, one Raphael Lemkin, and has been promoted with the utmost vigor by Jewish organizations around the world since it was passed by the UN General Assembly in December 1948.
The Genocide Convention has all the appearance of having been from its inception a Jewish exercise. There is no record of any prominent Jewish individual or organization having ever opposed it, nor, as far as can be ascertained, has any other “national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups, as such,” all supposedly objects of the conventions' concern, joined forces with the Jews in promoting it.
It is thus necessary to bring to bear on the Genocide convention all the insights and powers of political analysis which have been exercised in the preceding chapters of this book.
By the end of 1984 this treaty, whose ostensible purpose it is to brand genocide as an international crime, had been ratified
by some 90 member nations of the United Nations, including the United Kingdom, France, Western Germany, Sweden, Norway, Canada, and many Communist states-but had not yet, by the end of 1984, been ratified by the United States, where it was more strongly resisted than anywhere else in the world.
James J. Martin, in his book The Man Who Invented Genocide, tells us what happened when the treaty was first presented to the United States Senate for endorsement:
The signal for the really heavy political traffic on the Genocide Convention was the announcement in August 1949 that a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would start hearings on the ratification question, chaired by Senator Brien MacMahon (D-Conn.) during the early weeks of the coming session of Congress, On August 23 a combined pressure move by 26 national organizations, all associated with the National Civil Liberties Clearing House, hailed this new development and began their squeeze on the Senate for agreement on GC ratification. This band of groups included the American Veterans Committee, the Americans for Democratic Action, B’rtai B'rith, the American Jewish Committee, Hadassah, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Evangelical and Reformed Church.1
The “band of groups" continued to expand rapidly and presently included, among scores of others: the American Jewish Congress, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Committee of Jewish Writers and Artists, the Consultive Council of Jewish Organizations, the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations, the Institute of Jewish Affairs, the Jewish Reform Congregations, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, the Synagogue Council of America, the Union of Hebrew Congregations, and the Union of Orthodox Rabbis-to be joined in a “last-minute flurry of heavy pressure group muscle” shortly before the McMahon report was due to be presented to the Senate in 1950, by the National Community Relations Advisory Council, the “policy formulating body" of six national Jewish organizations and 28 local community councils.
We therefore labor under a disabling handicap if we continue to accept the Genocide Convention at face value as a genuine international instrument of law aimed at the protection of innumerable “national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups." As such, it makes no sense. On the other hand, it lends itself readily to explanation as a legal construct meant by its principle promoters only to strengthen and protect one group, namely, the Jews.
It should be noted that "genocide” is a new word not to be found 1 the standard dictionaries until about ten years after the end of /orld War II, and then defined only briefly as "deliberate extermination of race, nation, etc." In the Genocide Convention, owever, the world “genocide” has been invested with innumerable ther meanings-a circumstance that should warn us to be most rary about all that follows.
Lemkin, in his book Axis Rule Over Occupied Europe, used the rord at first only to mean "extermination.” He must soon have alized, however, that the kind of convention he had in mind could be hamstrung by so narrow a precise a definition, so he roceeded to give it an expanded meaning:
By “genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or ethnic group . . , Genocide has two phases: one, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor . . . Denationalization was the word used in the past to describe the destruction of a national pattern,
Extermination is thus replaced by assimilation (the remedy offered by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice) as the main anger, and this Lemkin calls genocide, showing again that it was only the Jewish group and its resistance to "denationalization" that e had in mind in explaining his plan for a Genocide Convention. In the Genocide Convention as finally passed by the United nations the process of redefinition is carried a stage further:
Article II
In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group;
The following shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide; and
(e) Complicity in genocide.
Anyone with an elementary knowledge of law and of court procedure in Western countries will realize after a few moments of reflection that any attempt to implement the above would produce the utmost confusion.
But why? Short answer: Because these two Articles alone flout one of the basic requirements of jurisprudence as understood in all civilized countries where some measure of freedom remains: that of using words and phrases that are capable of legal definition. Thus differences of interpretation which have always exercised the minds of lawyers and judges would be multiplied a thousandfold by words and phrases which no one has even attempted to define,
For example, all the offences listed hinge on the world "group”-but what exactly, in the context of the convention, is a "group"? All human beings belong to some group or other, so which qualify for protection under the convention and which do not? How about the Muslim Black Panthers; are they another group or just part of the Negro group? Are the Moonies, Scientologists, Mennonites, Doukhobors at! groups to be protected along with a variety of immigrant minorities in Western countries? And if the “Gays" (homosexuals), who have complained of harsh treatment, decide to claim the status of a religious group-which they could so easily do with so many clergymen in their ranks-who is to say them nay.
It stands to reason that any group claiming protection for its members will have to satisfy a "genocide” convention court under what heading it falls-national, ethnical, racial or religious? The British House of Lords has ruled that the Jews have no separate status as a group except as “a dissenting religious denomination,” that means that they have no more claim to a separate status in Britain than the adherents of any other religious denomination except the state religion of Anglicanism. Dr. Nahum Goldmann, at one time President of both the World Jewish Congress and the World Zionist Organization, tells us in his book The Jewish Paradox that in a student lecture he once provided more than 20 definitions of Judaism, “not one of them absolutely correct," If Dr. Goldmann, then the world’s number one Jew, could not even define his own group, how then is the word "group" to be defined in its applicability to the rest of marking? It might also be argued plausibly that a group which has survived for more than 2000 years and is today probably the wealthiest and most powerful on earth hardly qualified for special protection of the kind offered by the Genocide Convention,
Equally unamenable to legal definition are the words and phrases used in the list of punishable offenses. There need be no doubt about the meaning of the word “killing,’’ but how is “killing” to acquire the more serious aspect of “genocide?" And how is it to be proved that the killing of “part of a group," which could be one member of it, formed part of an intention to wipe out the entire group? Grotesque, too, from a legalistic point of view, is the expression "mental harm.” How is that to be defined in such a way as to leave a court in no doubt as to what is and what is not “mental harm?"
A word or phrase that can mean almost anything can be said in legalistic terms to mean nothing.
The categories of offense listed in Article III are not rendered less problematic when attached to clearly defined offenses under common law, like murder, arson, hijacking kidnapping, etc.; as supplementary to the offenses in Article II they only make “confusion worse confounded," depriving the genocide Convention of any claim to the serious consideration of trained legal minds in any country still enjoying some measure of “rule under due process of law,"
Nearly all the convention’s other articles are equally vulnerable to examination.
What it amounts to is that those who drafted the convention felt no need to define the words and phrases used. Like Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, they say, in effect: “Please don’t trouble yourselves trying to find out what our words mean; they mean what we say they mean, no more and no less." Or, to put it differently, the Genocide Convention can be made to work without any difficulty in a totalitarian state where words mean what the police and prosecutor say they mean, no more and no less, and where the courts, as an executive arm of those who rule, are no more than a public place where punishments can be seen to be imposed.
If the Genocide Convention does not mean protection for endangered groups, and if wholly irreconcilable with trial procedures in the West, then what does it mean to those who continue so strenuously to press for its acceptance and implementation by all nations?
An answer to that question will be more easily understood after we have dealt with a couple of other questions: how and why has the convention encountered more powerful opposition in the United States of America than anywhere else in the world? How was it possible for the Americans to spend 35 years wrestling with the problem without coming to a final decision?
A short answer to the first questions is that in terms of the Constitution of the United States an international treaty takes effect automatically as the law of the land, prevailing over any existing law that might stand in the way of its implementation. Thus, in the United States the Genocide Convention would operate at once as a legal instrument capable of revolutionizing the legal system, whereas in most other countries it could be regarded as no more than a political statement of intent having no immediate effect on existing laws. More particularly, the Convention could be seen at once as a threat to the powers enjoyed by all the states of the union, powers of local independence and limited self- government which it is the principal function of the US Senate to protect. The struggle over the Convention has continued down the years because of the enormous power of those promoting it, who evidently hope to be able, sooner or later, to overcome all resistance.
From Harry Truman in 1949 to Ronald Reagan in 1984, seven presidents of the USA have given the convention their personal approval. One or two of them-Jimmy Carter, for example-may have been stupid enough to see no harm in it, but one fact emerges clearly: For any aspirant for the high office of president, and any president hoping for reelection, it would have been politically suicidal to challenge those powers on which both main parties are largely dependent for funds; powers, moreover, whose control of the mass media of communications is almost complete. As was only to be expected, therefore, a few days before the 1984 presidential election, Ronald Reagan and his principal opponent, Walter Mondale, presented themselves personally before the national convention of the Jewish organization Bnai Brith, yarmulkas on their heads, to pledge their support for the Genocide Convention.
However, it needed more than the assent of the president to make an international treaty; a two-thirds majority vote in the senate is also required. Therefore, the president, even if personally opposed to the convention, always had an easy way out: he could leave it to the senate to handle in the usual dilatory way, untroubled by any fear that he might have “sold the pass.”
But, how were the senators, many of them not always in safe seats, to resist the same dangerous pressure to give the convention their endorsement? Answer: by interminable deferment and delay, a process of stalling much facilitated since the end of World War IT by America's involvement in a succession of major global disturbances, including the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, senators had to exercise their wits, to a maximum to prevent the convention coming to a final vote in the senate, dutifully endorsing the '‘sentiments” and the "principle" of the convention while at the same time never ceasing to render it innocuous with "amendments," ‘‘conditions,” etc.
Significantly, too, it was the clearly perceived revolutionary implications of the Genocide convention and the senate's constitutional powers of obstruction which made possible a more thorough professional examination of the convention than anywhere else in the world.
It says much for the power and tenacity of purpose of its promoters that a convention stripped of any semblance of juridical respectability by two subcommittees of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee {1949 and 1970) could still be primped up for presentation to the Senate again in 1984—when once again a seemingly irresistible combination of persuasion and terror just failed to shift an immovable spirit of foot-dragging, deferment and delay. The following quote from a report in the Washington weekly The Spotlight, October 22, 1984, even lends strength to the hope of many Americans that the immovable object may perhaps have gained something in immovability;
The defeat of the Genocide Convention did not come without cost., however. After opponents threatened to load up the bill with amendments. Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) proposed a non-binding resolution supporting the "principles" of the treaty and expressing the interest of the Senate to work in the next session to act “expeditiously* on the treaty ... Eleven senators did
not bother to show up for the vote which was considered little more that a sop to those who have been promoting the treaty.
The first major rebuff which the Genocide Convention received in 1949, even before the commencement of the sittings of the McMahon subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would have sufficed to knock out any set of political proposals less powerfully and resolutely sponsored: this was the flat rejection of it by the American Bar Association, a rejection to be repeated just as firmly 20 years later.
In 1954 the chairman of the American Bar Association, Frank E, Holman, in an address to the well-known patriotic organization Daughters of the American Revolution, denounced the treaty as "fraudulent," and Leander Perez of Louisiana, chairman of the States Rights Committee described it as "monstrous” and “a dishonest subterfuge." Generally, however, when the convention had been under discussion in the United States, those who criticize it have extended to its promoters and defenders the conventional courtesy of not questioning their bona fides and the purity of their intentions.
The Genocide Convention remained in a state of suspended animation until 1970, when it was revived by President Richard Nixon. Again the Senate was asked to confer on it their blessings, and again the Senate handed it over for further examination to a subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, this time under the chairmanship of Senator Frank Church and with Senator Jacob Javits of New York, a passionate proponent of the convention, as one of its members.
The weird unreality of the convention was never more clearly exhibited than by those who set out to defend it before the Frank Church subcommittee, especially those sent by the State Department.
Senator Church asked at one stage:
Can any of you cite a single instance where any one of the 70-odd countries that have in fact become members of this treaty have proceeded against any citizen within their jurisdiction, charged them with genocide, tried them and convicted them? Has there been a single case where this treaty has actually been invoked on the part of any of the 75 countries that have ratified it?
Charles W, Yost, then United States ambassador to the United Nations, replying for the rest, conceded that he was “not aware” of any such action either, but continued to insist that ratification by the United States was worthwhile.
Senator Church was still baffled:
I find it hard to conceive that any government, even though it might be a signatory to this convention, which actually engages in such practice in the future, is either going to confess to the crime or is going to take any action to punish Itself, That exceeds the bounds of realism. Moreover, it is difficult to believe that any government, so inclined, would act against individual citizens within its jurisdiction guilty of genocide.
Had nothing happened since 1949 that could be classified as genocide? How about the Biafra-Nigeria imbroglio, the Indonesian massacre of 200,000 so-called “communists,” or the mutual killings in India and Pakistan? The only explanation Ambassador Yost could offer was that “serious arguments" challenging the description of any of these as genocide had stopped any further action at the United Nations.
James Martin, in The Man Who Invented Genocide, published in 1984, brings us up to date:
Though there have been many accusations of ^genocide” made against a variety of countries in the last 35 years, in the United Nations there has never been a single international indictment, trial or conviction for such a “crime’' before that body in ail that time, or anywhere else.
Another intriguing feature of the evidence given by the State Department professionals, when their attention was drawn to the serious implications of some of the obligations to which the United States would be bound as a signatory, was the argument that these could be disregarded. One of the principal witnesses before the Frank Church subcommittee, Senator Sam Ervin, himself a lawyer by profession, remarked:
The State Department baffles me why it wants to get a treaty like this ratified and then tries to devise dubious ways to show that we don't have to do what it obligates us to do; that is something I can’t comprehend.
A subcommittee member, Senator John Cooper, was also baffled: “One of the problems that concerns me in ratifying the treaty relates to the obligations we undertake in carrying it out. But the arguments we heard concerned methods of evading it.“ The thoroughly professional treatment given to the Genocide Convention by Senator Sam Ervin before the Senate subcommittee on May 22, 1970, leaves nothing more to be said or written by way of showing that the convention has no meaning whatever as an instrument of law aimed at discouraging and punishing acts of genocide either by individuals or nations.
Before proceeding to analyze the conventions' articles one by one, he presented a short history with almost the whole truth compressed into a dozen lines of the printed record:
During the 1940s activists connected with the United Nation3 engaged in a strenuous effort to establish by treaties laws to supercede domestic laws of nations throughout the earth. The Genocide Convention represents one of these efforts. It originated in a resolution of the United Nations condemning genocide as a crime whether “committed on religious, racial, political or any grounds." When reduced to its Snal form it excluded genocide committed on “political" grounds because some of the parties to it did not wish to surrender, even nominally, their right to exterminate political groups hostile to their rulers. (Emphasis added).
Senator Ervin added:
The only argument now advanced for ratification of this convention is that it would improve the image of the United States in the eyes of Russia and other totalitarian parties to the convention which, strange to say, have repudiated by understanding and reservations many of the provisions of the convention.
Senator Ervin’s comments on one subsection provide a good example of his annihilating analysis of nearly all the convention’s clauses:
If the convention is ratified, Article 11(c) would impose upon the United States the duty to prevent and to prosecute and punish anyone who deliberately inflicts “on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." What this means, no mind can fathom. Does it mean that a state or county official who refuses to give to a member of one of the four groups designated in the convention the amount of welfare benefits deemed desirable is to be punished or prosecuted for genocide? Does it mean that the Court of International Justice shall have power under Article IX to adjudge that Congress or a state legislature which does not make available to one of the four groups what the court deems to be adequate welfare benefits lias violated the convention?
Senator Ervin read into the record another thorough analysis of the convention in the form of an article by Orie L. Phillips, Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, published in the August 1949 issue of the Journal of the American Bar Association.
All this expert criticism of the Genocide Convention having been strengthened rather than weakened by the searching questions addressed to Senator Ervin by the three members of the subcommittee, Senator Jacob Javits created something of a precedent by asking for and being granted permission to submit later what he called "a point-by-point rebuttal."
This “rebuttal” admits of no possibility of an intelligible replying point-by-point rebuttal, because it draws the whole subject of the Genocide Convention into a kaleidoscopic world of the mind in which all the meanings which form part of the process of coherent thought are so altered by distortion or inversion that they can be handled only by a trained practitioner of a form of intellectual aggression which George Orwell has called Doublethink. This is a form of rhetoric in which the promotion of hostile intentions prescribed the subordination of truth to policy; in other words, it is a form of warfare, still to be universally recognized as such, in which physical force, so long the arbiter in any contest of interests between human “groups,” is replaced by a “peaceful" application of moral violence.
Therefore, no purpose would be served by trying to summarize Senator Javits's “rebuttal." It has been reproduced verbatim in James Martin's book from the printed record of the subcommittee, where it is available to anyone wishing to sharpen his wits by studying it.2
So, what is the real meaning of a Genocide Convention which evidently means so much to those who invented it and have always been most active in promoting it?
That question has already been partly answered: The convention is a purely Jewish exercise masked only very thinly with tender concern for innumerable unnamed other groups but intended solely to promote and protect the interests of one group: namely, a powerful and highly organized Jewish nation dispersed among other nations, nowhere more plentifully than in the United States of America and Europe.
But why should the Jews attach importance to so flimsy an instrument of international law at a time when their own great power appears to be approaching its zenith and when, as a group, they appear to be less under threat than ever before in their long and troubled history?
The short answer to that question is that in spite of their present great wealth and power the Jews have a haunting fear that they are headed for trouble; they know that they are exposing themselves increasingly as an identifiable group with separate interests, and they know that the policies they are now promoting, aimed at placing themselves in a final and unassailable position of power and safety at the apex of a planned new global dispensation, are bound to give rise, sooner or later, to an escalation of alarm and antagonism among other peoples,
For reasons of expediency, the Jews have always pretended not to be able to understand the phenomenon misleadingly labelled “anti-Semitism"; but more than 2000 years of experience will have taught them beyond any shadow of doubt that the antagonism of the peoples among whom they dwell is only part of the price they must pay for the advantages of a heightened sense of group togetherness and the material rewards of a dual code of ethics. They know, also, that the increasing internationalization of Jewish attitudes and activity in the 20th century is being accompanied by a corresponding internationalization of “anti-Semitism," bringing with it the possibility of a disaster of unprecedented magnitude for the Jewish people.
The Genocide convention is thus an exercize aimed at laying the foundations for a system of punitive international law, complete with an international genocide tribunal under Article VI, fortified with the respectability of endorsement by all nations, ready to be invoked and put into use when required.
That explains the almost boundless expansion of the meaning of the word “genocide" in the convention, since the Jews would feel threatened and endangered by virtually any sign of negative reaction which they themselves arouse as they press forward with plans to gain final control of a totalitarian world order now in the process of being set up.
The real meaning of the Genocide Convention also offers to explain a range of other phenomena, including the indefatigability of efforts to secure United States ratification-for of what use are all the other ratifications if this one is still lacking? Another question: How otherwise are we to explain the presence among those who have ratified the convention of many Third World states whose leaders have never ceased inflicting genocidal oppression on dissenting cultural minorities? The fact that the convention could be so readily accepted, with only minor conditions, by notoriously cruel and oppressive totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and Communist China, also brands it as a terrorist instrument for the control of populations - the very opposite of what it is made out to be.
Dr. Nahum Goldmann, in his book The Jewish Paradox, describes the Jewish people as "the most paradoxical in the world," a description that fully embraces the Genocide Convention, an instrument of international law designed to take the risk out of risky Jewish policies and actions and reconcile two completely contradictory fears: the fear of being rejected and jpersecuted and the fear of being accepted and assimilated.
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It would be a gross and misleading overs implication to suggest that the power nexus now promoting a plan for the centralization of all political power in a new world order is exclusively Jewish. As explained earlier in this book, the plan for world government in its present form first took shape in the 20th century as an “Anglo- American” exercise, promoted from one side of the Atlantic by Cecil John Rhodes and his associates, including Lord Milner, and on the other side by the super-rich White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) pioneering families headed by banker J.P. Morgan; when this essentially non-Jewish financial elite lost its position at the apex of international finance-capitalism {as recorded by Professor Quigley), it was not wiped out but only drawn into orbit in a constellation of financial power it could no longer control, to be held in position thereafter by strong motives of shared worldly interest. Similarly drawn into orbit in the great 20th century power constellation were successive generations of intellectuals who found in an ideology of universalism and “world order" the double advantage of filling the gap left by a lost religious faith and of being richly rewarded in world terms.
Notes
1. The Man Who Invented Genocide, James J, Martin, Institute of Historical Review, Torrance, California, 19S4.
2. Is there a word for Senator Javitz’s kind of rhetoric? There is: “populisms," not to be found in moat concise dictionaries, but defined in Webster's as 'casuistic argumentation, esp, among Jewish scholars on Talmudic subjects."