Review essay

Thesis Eleven
2023, Vol. 174(1) 135–143
On the genocide concept ª The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/07255136231151500
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A. Dirk Moses
The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression
(Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Reviewed by: Jon Piccini, Australian Catholic University

Abstract
A. Dirk Moses’ The Problems of Genocide builds on his decades of work in the field of
genocide research. This review article looks at the impact the book has had to date
before considering its two key arguments – that genocide’s invention in the 1940s
distilled a centuries old ‘language of transgression’, which in turn served to justify and
normalise what Moses dubs ‘liberal permanent security’. I conclude by considering the
possibilities and limits of ‘conceptual history’.

Keywords
colonialism, fascism, genocide, history of ideas, humanitarianism

On 16 October 1970, four Indigenous Australians presented a petition to Edward

Lawson, Deputy Director of Human Rights at the United Nations in New York. Each
petitioner wore a red bandana, described by the group’s leader Jack Davis as symbolising
‘the blood of Aborigines killed in the colonisation and development of Australia by
settlers’ (Canberra Times, 1970). The words of the petition, presented in the name of the
Aborigine Advancement League of Australia, were no less powerful, accusing the
Australian government of what has become known as the ‘crime of crimes’ – genocide.
‘We speak of the literal, physical destruction of our people’, the petition claimed, ‘this
genocide started when the Europeans first invaded us almost two hundred years ago’
when ‘they poisoned us, they methodically and brutally murdered us’ (Ghattas, 2021;
Piccini, 2019). Since then, the ‘techniques of the invaders have become more subtle’,
but the aim of complete destruction remained unchanged: ‘because the effect of what
they do, and what they fail to do, is still to exterminate us’ (Department of External
Affairs, 1970).
The petition made news. It was yet another example of the Australian government’s
inept handling of relations with international organisations, and a document was
136 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

produced to discredit its claims. Far from ‘invasion’, what had occurred in 1788 was
merely a ‘culture clash’ leading to ‘intolerance and misunderstanding that expressed
itself in occasional violence’. In any case, the Indigenous population was now growing at
a rate of 4 per cent and infant mortality was improving. Far from a barbarous, inhuman
program of elimination, the Australian government was assisting ‘these citizens [to]
realise fully their potential’ (Department of External Affairs, 1970).
Dirk Moses’ The Problems of Genocide (2021a) helps us to understand how this
incident occurred in the way that it did. The 1970s were a key moment in the verna-
cularising of the genocide concept and its sibling, human rights. Critics of the Vietnam
War argued that its brutal conduct exemplified the UN’s definition of genocide, as did
partisans in the Pakistani and Nigerian civil wars, East Timorese guerrillas, and many
others. Academics were also discovering the term, applying it to diverse fields and even
coining a new one: holocaust studies. Genocide was a distillation of the centuries-old
‘language of transgression’, Moses argues, but its applicability proved to be limited for
those whose experience of extermination differed from that which had been sacralised:
the Holocaust.
For the Australian government, the petitioners’ claim fit into an elaborate psycho-
drama of national survival. If raised in the General Assembly, bureaucrats feared,
arguments for genocide were ‘certain to get the support of certain Asian, Arab and
Communist Bloc delegations if for no other reason than to embarrass the Australian
government’ (Department of External Affairs, 1970). Such accusations were dangerous
to a settler state engaged in the process of establishing what Moses dubs ‘permanent
security’ – a desire to dispatch enemies, real and imagined, current or future – so as to
ensure their polity’s perpetual survival. ‘[T]here was never a policy of genocide’ from
the government, the department claimed, and in any case present policy reflected a
‘positive advancement programme’ (Department of External Affairs, 1970). What
Moses dubs ‘liberal permanent security’ underlies this argument: in the absence of
brutal, unthinking villains and pure, non-political victims, what took place could simply
not be genocide.

I
Product of some two decades of scholarship, The Problems of Genocide is at once a
synthesis of a vibrant field, and a carefully argued rejection of its key principles – or
dogmas, if we are to follow Moses’ religious vernacular. The book is in many ways a
testament to Moses’ key role in fostering a new generation of critical genocide scholars:
he has edited the Journal of Genocide Studies since 2011 and published nearly a dozen
edited volumes. Yet the new book has sparked substantial controversy. Part of this
emerged from Moses’ publication in March 2021 of an article entitled ‘The German
Catechism’, in the Swiss online journal History of the Present (Moses, 2021b). Here,
Moses argued that official state forms of Holocaust memory in Germany had reached
such a hegemonic level as to silence debate on other troublesome pasts. Since German
Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, Moses’ (2007) book based on his doctoral thesis, he has
interrogated assumptions that the Holocaust was central to the birth of a ‘healthy
democratic culture’ in post-war Germany. What was in the 1980s a progressive demand
Piccini 137

to account for the crimes of the past became a ‘political theology’ in later decades, used
by conservatives to silence debate on German colonialism, racism within its borders, and
the Israel-Palestine question.
Many academics engaged with this provocation in good faith, but condemnation from
the German press was swift. Reactions to this article became enwrapped in a broader
debate around Problems, with some accusing Moses of taking the contextualism of the
Cambridge school too far. Critics posited that Moses had transformed the concept of
genocide, coined by Raphael Lemkin in the early 1940s, into a ‘Jewish-Zionist plot’
(Stone, 2022). Partly owing to what one commentator described as his ‘Arendt-inspired
tone that seemed designed to enrage’, Moses’ book has been selectively read via the
concerns and predilections of the present. This is unfortunate, given the work’s sub-
stantial sweep from the 16th century to the present. Even if one might disagree with
sections of his argument, Moses’ intervention constitutes a significant and important
re-reading of not only the history of genocide but human rights, colonialism and the
Western-led global order itself. Building on the work of critical historians of empire and
humanitarianism, Moses contends that rather than criminalising mass murder, the effect
of the genocide concept has been to legitimate it.

II
Only weeks before Moses’ excoriation of Germany’s lopsided Holocaust memory
culture appeared in History of the Present, Human Rights Watch (2021) made a dramatic
intervention into one of the modern world’s most protracted conflicts. In a report
subtitled ‘a threshold crossed’, the US-based organisation applied a label to the practices
of Israel in its occupied territories that had deep historical resonance: apartheid.
Translated as ‘separateness’ from Afrikaans, the term became embedded in international
law via the 1974 UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of
Apartheid, and Israeli sources quickly dubbed the report an example of antisemitism.
Terminology is important here. HRW may indeed be guilty of antisemitism, if one were
to follow the definition offered by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance
(2022), which includes describing the ‘State of Israel as a racist endeavour’ as an act
which ‘den[ies] the Jewish people their right to self-determination’. Much has been
written to highlight holes in HRW’s definition of apartheid. Yet, perhaps most impor-
tantly for our purposes, is HRW’s insistence that Israel had ‘crossed . . . a threshold’ in its
inferior treatment of Palestinian Arabs under its rule. For Moses, such language fits
within a centuries-old tradition he dubs ‘the language of transgression’ – whereby
Western actors have utilised languages of shared humanity and moral boundaries to
critique the practices of governments, empires and corporations.
One of Moses’ key interventions in this book is to historicise the practice of utilising
moral opprobrium as a tool to question governmental – and primarily colonial – policies,
which he argues was captured and neutered by the genocide concept. The concept of
a threshold is central in this, and in Problems we find that its origins lie in critics of
Spanish colonialism in the so-called ‘new world’. Even at this early period of coloni-
alism, now familiar refrains of European ‘gentleness and humanity’ were counterposed
to the ‘Amerindians scandalous violations of natural law’, and the historic role of Spain
138 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

as civiliser and saviour. Moses highlights the significance, then, of an intervention by

Catholic priest Bartolomé de las Casas, who’s 1551 book ‘inverted the image of civilized
Europeans who followed the laws of nature and barbarians who violated them’, working
to ‘shock the Spanish ruling class to reform its new American holdings’ (Moses, 2021a:
54). This is a well-known case, but Moses’ contribution by beginning here is not to locate
the origin of humanitarian sentiment – which has roots in the Roman era – but the
beginnings of a lexical tradition which drew distinctions between legitimate and
illegitimate violence and invoked state power to challenge the latter. As Moses puts it:
‘The language of transgression thus highlighted some systems of exploitation while
condoning actions and processes that fell below Las Casas’s threshold of shocking: they
were acceptable forms of exploitation’ (Moses, 2021a: 60).
Las Casas’ protest against the excesses of Spanish colonial rule targeted entrepreneurs
and exploiters, imploring the king to impose imperial law and order in the name of
humanity. If that sounds familiar, it is because almost the same language has been used
by humanitarians who critiqued empire across the next five centuries. Moses utilises this
insight to undertake a fascinating re-reading of the Western canon. He identifies how the
language of transgression became one of empire, at the centre of which was a rhetoric of
‘protection’. Equally, it became less the preserve of non-government agitators and more
a tool of inter-imperial contestation. Established powers – Britain and France in par-
ticular – described the acts of lesser powers, or non-state actors like the East India
Company and slave traders, as violating ‘the conscience of humanity’. This language of
protection itself had by the 19th century become focused on ‘small nations’ – most
famously in the case of European designs on the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian case is
particularly evocative here. Western advocates in the late 19th century described
Armenia as a ‘victim nation’ subject to Turkish aggression, while the latter’s claim to be
countering ‘widespread sedition’ amongst the minority group was dismissed out of hand
(Moses, 2021a: 83–4). The campaign of extermination during the First World War saw
the Allied powers accuse the Ottoman government of ‘new crimes . . . against humanity
and civilisation’ – the first recorded instance of that term’s use in a diplomatic
communication.
The Ottoman outrages were particularly formative for Lemkin, who claims in his
memoir that Armenia set him on the course towards defining genocide. The early
decades of the 20th century also saw an even greater ‘tethering of the language of
transgression to power’ (Moses, 2021a: 118), with its language used to justify the cre-
ation of an international humanitarian infrastructure as part of the League of Nations.
Unsurprisingly, German attempts to use the very same language to condemn the
victorious allied powers – highlighting in particular colonial crimes in Australia – came
to little. Instead, Germany and Turkey, through their crimes against the Armenians, the
Herero people of Southwest Africa and much else besides, were found to have
demonstrated a lack of ‘sensitiv[ity] to the rights of weaker nations’, as American
philosopher John M. Mecklin put it. German actions in particular demonstrated an
inability to exercise the type of ostensibly benign tutelage practised by Britain, France
and, Mecklin envisaged, an ascendant American power. The language of transgression
became a key conceptual buttress to the League’s Mandates Commission, whereby
former German colonies were brought under neo-colonial administration by her rivals.
Piccini 139

Mecklin hoped the Commission would prove to be a ‘conscience of the world’ (Moses,
2021a: 120).
Lemkin inherited this long-standing vernacular and, Moses argues, completed its
assimilation into the language of power through his work on the Genocide Convention.
Yet, part of Problems’ contribution is also to challenge the novelty of the Polish
lawyer’s innovation: he was but one articulator of many who, like Mecklin, saw a
future where morality and protection would govern world affairs. Attempts to ban
aggressive wars and mass violence in fact proliferated in the interwar, perhaps most
famously the Kellogg-Briand pact. Within this legal tumult, Moses gives particular
attention to another Jewish lawyer, the Russian Andre Mandelstam, who ‘remains
virtually unknown despite proposing human rights protections well before Lemkin
proposed such measures’ (Moses, 2021a: 156–7). What Lemkin added to the mix was a
small state nationalism inspired, Moses contends, by his Zionist politics, ‘linking
the fate of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazi occupation under the rubric of
“genocide”’ (Moses, 2021a: 203).
Lemkin’s culturalist understanding of nationalism posited that each ‘people’ needed
their own state, an idea which chimed with leaders of small states in the incipient UN –
particularly in South America, but also those who had been subject to Nazi aggression
and occupation in East and Central Europe. The success of the Genocide Convention,
never a foregone conclusion, then relied on Lemkin’s ability to ‘market a grand sim-
plification of points others were making’ (Moses, 2021a: 177). In order to do that,
however, Lemkin had to remove much of the substance of the earlier legal thought he
drew upon – indeed, even his own deeply historical awareness of genocide. In so doing, a
definition was created which, while redolent with the language of violation and
‘shocking the conscience of mankind’, excluded the ‘liberal’ permanent security per-
petrated by nation-states ordinarily seen as behaving as good global citizens.

III
The publication of Keith Windschuttle’s (2002) The Fabrication of Aboriginal History
sparked a ‘history war’ in Australia, aided by the work’s championing by then prime
minister John Howard. Windschuttle accused eminent historians of inventing, over-
simplifying or distorting facts. Fabrication’s primary case study, of Van Diemen’s Land
(modern-day Tasmania) in the first half of the 19th century, alleged that British forces
had not mounted a planned campaign of extermination but instead took legitimate
actions against law breakers (Moses, 2003). At the time, Moses identified in several of
Windschuttle’s arguments the basis of what in Problems he defines as liberal permanent
security. Windschuttle argued that violence was ‘incidental rather than intrinsic’ to
colonial Tasmania by ‘redefining the concept of massacres into meaninglessness’, cast
resistance to invasion as ‘law breaking’, and finally, engaged in victim blaming: any
violence committed by the British was motivated by a need to ‘defend themselves’. The
Indigenous victims of British aggression were, under this reading of their actions,
criminals, and as such outside of politics, while violence undertaken against them was
viewed as measured and reasonable under the logic of the existing legal system. Moses
argues that a desire to defend actions such as these – to bracket off genocide from the
140 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

everyday crimes of settler colonialism and inter-state warfare – was central to the design
of that term in the 1940s.
Lemkin, who passed away in relative obscurity in 1959, was regularly invoked in
Australian debates of the 2000s. As part of Lemkin’s planned but never realised 40
chapter history of genocide, he had penned a draft chapter on Tasmania (Curthoys,
2005). This case was particularly powerful for Lemkin, as it showed the ways that
individual and governmental responsibility for genocide were related, and how the
removal of children could be ‘a way of destroying a human group’, one that was
‘especially evident in the Tasmanian case’ (Curthoys, 2005: 168–9). The existence of
liberal permanent security measures necessitated an illiberal counterpart, and it is here
that Moses connects the two key thrusts of his book: the language of transgression, he
argues, created acceptable and unacceptable forms of colonial violence. In Chapter 6,
Problems characterises permanent security as being associated with an idea of collective
guilt (that all members of a particular group are responsible for the actions of a few), pre-
emption (that potential future crimes must be averted by taking measures today), and a
sense of paranoia fired by shared (often imagined) historical grievances.
Moses carefully links the rise of this defensive, exterminatory way of thinking with
the governing of foreign peoples. While reaching back to the Roman destruction of
Carthage, conducted so as to permanently remove a potential opponent, exterminism is
of course particularly prominent in colonial and settler societies. As Patrick Wolfe
(2006: 388) argued, the ‘extermination of the native’ was a pre-condition of the settler
desire to ‘come to stay’. ‘Permanent security is signalled by the language of final
solutions’, Moses argues, something he observes in massacres in Australia, population
removals in Anatolia, and the ‘liquidation’ of Kulaks in Russia. And, in a chapter pivotal
to Moses’ argument, the claim is made that this was replicated in the practices of Nazi
Germany, which aimed to ‘make Germans great and safe again – for a thousand years’
(Moses, 2021a: 277). By casting the Third Reich as an example of illiberal permanent
security, Moses builds on a wealth of scholarship on the Nazi ‘empire’ and its colonial
practices. Yet, Problems identifies a lacuna in this literature: was the destruction of the
Jews not superfluous to the broader imperial agenda? Given the irrational degree to
which that goal was pursued, could by anything but driven apolitical hatred? What links
German colonial expansionism prior to the First World War and the Nazi desire to create
a new empire in Eastern Europe was what Problems describes as an ‘imperial imaginary’
that energised Hitler, with Moses detailing the influence of both British and Mongol
empires on key Nazi leaders.
Hitler repurposed long-circulating ideas of the need for German Empire, particularly
as expressed by pan-Germanist thinkers, into an ideology framed by two seemingly
contradictory sentiments. Germany’s destiny, so this thinking went, was to occupy and
exploit Slavic lands on a settler-colonial model, yet at the same time Germany itself was
undergoing colonisation by Jews. That these views are not politically rational is beside
the point for Moses, who argues ‘the stories that imperialists tell themselves are centrally
important – especially if they are paranoid’ (Moses, 2021a: 304). Problems contends that
we must take Nazi leaders at their word, even if they were driven by crude conspiracy
theories and buttressed by concocted ‘evidence’. They, like many other Europeans at the
time, and in our own time via the alt-right mythology of a ‘great replacement’, feared an
Piccini 141

international Jewish conspiracy. This helps to explain the incongruity of a statement like
that delivered by Otto Ohlendorf, leader of Einsatzgruppe 4, that he killed some 80,000
Jewish men, women and children so as to deliver ‘an immediate and permanent security
of our own realm’. The killing of children made sense in this context, as ‘children would
grow up and surely . . . constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents’ (Moses,
2021a: 323–4). Following this logic, the killing of Jewish children in Germany and the
removal of Indigenous ones in Australia – whether to eliminate a future threat or to
‘breed out the colour’ – can be plotted along a continuum of eliminationist assumptions.
The synchronicity of Nazi practices with those of a longer colonial project was
equally apparent, Moses contends, at the end of the Second World War, which saw a rush
of genocidal projects in the name of human rights. Drawing on perceived lessons of the
League of Nations mandate system as to the dangers of and to minority populations in
nation-states, population transfer was committed ‘not in contravention of human rights’,
but instead ‘in the name of establishing a new order based on the “rights of man” and
what now is called genocide prevention’ (Moses, 2021a: 334). Population movements at
the time of Indian independence into majority Hindu and Muslim states, at the cost of a
million lives, the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from modern
Israel, and the cleansing of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe were not acts of
genocide but reflected ‘Lemkin’s ontology of humanity as first and foremost comprising
ethnic nations’ (Moses, 2021a: 392). Similarly non-genocidal was the use of forced
displacement as a part of ‘counterinsurgency’ warfare that raged across the decolonising
world in the 1950s and 1960s. Moses highlights how critics of the Vietnam War tried in
vain to invoke the charge of genocide to their cause, thinking in particular of the
‘strategic hamlets’ into which Indochinese peasants were displaced to deny the com-
munist enemy succour (Moses, 2021a: Chapter 10). They failed, Problems contends, due
to the increasingly rarefied definition of genocide itself, and the centrality of the
Holocaust to its academic proponents.

IV
Reinhart Koselleck (1989: 310), student of Heidegger and Schmidt, survivor of a Sta-
linist labour camp and purveyor of conceptual history, described in 1989 the insepar-
ability of social life from the ideas which animate it:

Without searching for social formations together with their concepts, by virtue of which –
reflectively or self-reflectively – they determine and resolve their challenges, there is no
history, it cannot be experienced, interpreted, represented or explained.

Koselleck, footnoted twice in Moses’ book, seems here to get at the core of what
Problems aims to do. Taking a much-discussed and value-laden concept like genocide
and giving it a social life – as a concept born of human frailty and, as such, less an
inevitability than a historical accident – is both incredibly revealing and bound to arouse
controversy. One is here reminded of another academic contrarian, Samuel Moyn, whose
Cambridge University Press book series Problems appears in. Moyn’s The Last Utopia
(2010) arguably did for human rights what Moses aims to do for genocide. Human rights
142 Thesis Eleven 174(1)

were not a universal inheritance from ancient religion or the age of revolutions, in
Moyn’s argument, but a product of contingent circumstances – in the 1940s and then
the 1970s – that allowed, against substantial odds, for a moral world order to emerge.
And, crucially, this order has failed to meet the desires of previous generations of
radicals and utopians but instead worked to buttress pre-existing power relations.
The final two chapters of Problems make a similar case for genocide by following the
career of genocide studies, from its germination in 1978 (a year that Moyn also high-
lights as central to human rights) to its explosion in the 1990s. Key scholars in that field
reframed genocide as, in the words of founding figure Israel W. Charny, ‘the mass killing
of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against
the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defenseless-
ness and helplessness of the victims’ (Moses 2021a: 451). Genocide, then, was a crime of
targeting people who had no hope of defending themselves: excluding colonial violence
at the end of empire, civil conflicts in the third world and, by the 21st century, crimes
associated with the US-led war on terror. This was not, Moses contends, a recent dis-
tortion of the genocide concept, but one central to its making, and the ‘language of
transgression’ from which it emerged. Moses concludes by discussing how the language
of transgression’s creation of illiberal and liberal forms of permanent security impacts
our world today. Genocide, so rarefied, is a nearly impossible charge to prove legally.
The necessity of a purely evil perpetrator and morally upright, undeserving victim places
contemporary movements in a nearly impossible bind, forcing them into a supine
position in Western morality plays.
Does Moses’ intention of replacing the crime of genocide with a broader one of
permanent security offer deliverance from the former’s manifold problems? Those
critics who have highlighted that the term is unlikely to work in a legal context possibly
miss the point: Problems in the end asks us to consider the limits of what political
language can achieve. Koselleck was also very aware of this dimension of history:
language both precedes historical events and can never fully capture their meaning.
Those Indigenous peoples who petitioned the UN in 1970 seemed aware of this
problem, asking that the Australian government by judged ‘by what it does, not by
what it says’ (Department of External Affairs, 1970). In the end, Moses’ contribution is
to highlight the political construction of terms and concepts we take for granted, not
merely to recognise the power of language but to remind us that it can be reconstructed
anew.

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Author biography
Jon Piccini is Senior Lecturer in History at Australian Catholic University in Brisbane. His work is
broadly concerned with ‘Australia in the world’, particularly social movements, the history of
ideas, as well as politics and culture. He has written Transnational Protest, Australia and the
1960s: Global Radicals (Palgrave, 2016), Human Rights in Twentieth Century Australia (Cam-
bridge University Press, 2019) and has edited, with Evan Smith and Matthew Worley, The Far Left
in Australia since 1945 (Routledge, 2019). He is currently working on a manuscript exploring the
impact of decolonisation on post-war Australia.