Genocide As Social Practice Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights Series

Genocide as Social Practice Genocide, Political Violence, Human Rights Series Edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, Stephen Eric Bronner, and Nela Navarro Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture Lawrence Davidson, Cultural Genocide Daniel Feierstein, Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas Alexander Laban Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory Irina Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador Samuel Totten and Rafiki Ubaldo, eds., We Cannot Forget: Interviews with Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda Ronnie Yimsut, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey Genocide as Social Practice Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas DANIEL FEIERSTEIN Translated by Douglas Andrew Town RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY, AND LONDON LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Feierstein, Daniel, 1967– [Genocidio como práctica social. English] Genocide as social practice : reorganizing society under the Nazis and Argentinás military juntas / Daniel Feierstein ; translated Douglas Andrew Town. pages cm. — (Genocide, political violence, human rights series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–8135–6318–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6317–6 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6319–0 (e-book) 1. Genocide. 2. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945) 3. Genocide—Argentina. I. Title. HV6322.7.F4213 2014 304.6Ј630943—dc23 2013033862 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. First published in Spanish as El genocidio como práctica social: Entre el nazismo y la experiencia argentina (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007). English translation copyright © 2014 by Daniel Feierstein All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu Manufactured in the United States of America CONTENTS Foreword by Alexander Laban Hinton vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Bridging the Gap between Two Genocides 1 PART ONE Some Theoretical Questions 1 Defining the Concept of Genocide 11 2 Toward a Typology of Genocidal Social Practices 39 3 Reconciling the Contradictions of Modernity: Equality, Sovereignty, Autonomy, and Genocidal Social Practices 52 PART TWO Historical Foundations: The Nazi Genocide 4 Discourse and Politics in Holocaust Studies: Uniqueness, Comparability, and Narration 71 5 The Problem of Explaining the Causes of the Nazi Genocides 87 6 Reshaping Social Relations through Genocide 104 v vi CONTENTS PART THREE Toward a Historical Basis: Genocidal Social Practices in Argentina 7 Explaining Genocidal Social Practices in Argentina: The Problem of Causation 131 8 Toward a Periodization of Genocide in Argentina 161 9 Concentration Camp Logic 186 10 In Conclusion: The Uses of Memory 205 Notes 215 Index 251 FOREWORD In recent years, the field of genocide studies has begun a critical reassessment. As this process has taken place, concepts and cases, old and new, have come into dialogue and important conversations and debates have begun. Several of these discussions emerge in Daniel Feierstein’s Genocide as Social Practice: Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas, which consti- tutes a key contribution to this turn in our understanding of genocide. The title highlights the book’s challenge. Genocide, it tells us, may centrally involve not just the mass destruction of a group of marginalized “others,” as conventional understandings hold, but a profound internal reorganization of society amidst fear and terror. Viewing genocide as a social practice opens up an entirely different way of understanding such violence, one initially suggested by Raphael Lemkin, the person who coined the term. Not surprisingly, Professor Feierstein discusses Lemkin’s work at length, even as he develops his own arguments about the nexus of genocide, power, and social life. Professor Feierstein’s book offers yet another provocation as it juxtaposes the Argentinian and Nazi cases. For many people, the destruction of European Jewry stands as the exemplar of genocide, a notion epitomized, through metonymy, by industrial mass murder at Auschwitz. Genocide as Social Practice argues that the 1976–1983 violence in Argentina, during which perhaps 20,000 people perished and many more suffered in fear and terror, was a case of genocide comparable—not in the numbers killed but in the social effects of the violence—to the Nazi reorganization of Germany and occupied Europe. Professor Feierstein makes this argument through a detailed comparison of both cases. In doing so, he suggests that, like Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, concentration camps in Argentina may also shed light on the genocidal process in general, and genocide as a social practice in particular. His challenge to our understanding of genocide emerges in other ways as well. Written as a series of trials in Argentina were underway, Genocide as Social Practice asks us to take a closer look not just at our commonsense understandings of genocide, but also at the definition given in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. vii viii FOREWORD This widely used legal definition specifies that genocide only takes place when a racial, ethnic, national, or religious group has been targeted for destruction. Political, economic, social, and other groups were excluded after much debate at the United Nations because they were said to be “mutable” categories. As a consequence, the events in Argentina—and other countries in Latin America and elsewhere—have often been described as political violence or, sometimes, “politicide.” Professor Feierstein’s book asks us to reconsider such assumptions. Drawing inspiration, in part, from Lemkin, he argues in Genocide as Social Practice that the notion of “national groups” is much broader than convention- ally understood and may encompass the destruction of political and other social groups heretofore excluded from the genocide studies canon. This claim significantly broadens the purview of genocide and is sure to generate debate. First published in Spanish in 2007, Genocide as Social Practice has already had a major impact in parts of Latin America, particularly in Argentina, where Professor Feierstein is based. His ideas and arguments have informed legal debates there as lawyers, jurists, and members of civil society have debated whether or not the events that took place under the military junta can be considered genocide. In a landmark decision in 2006 Judge Carlos Rozanski ruled that this violence constituted genocide—a decision that subsequently found support in other domestic courts before Judge Rozanski ruled in a second case in 2012 that the violence “unequivocally” qualified as genocide. The debate continues in Argentina. Now, with the publication of this translation of Genocide as Social Practice, it will commence in the English-speaking world as well. While not everyone will agree with all of Professor Feierstein’s arguments, readers will need to consider them seriously and, in so doing, reexamine their own preconceptions about genocide. Like the best of books, Genocide as Social Practice challenges its readers to engage in such critical thinking. –Alexander Hinton, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have the deep conviction that a theoretical book is a collective product. That is why, when one finishes such a book, somehow a feeling arises that one has appropriated the ideas, dreams, intuitions and labor of the many people with whom one has come in contact while writing the book. Perhaps the acknowledgments page is the space in which one tries—who knows if successfully—to ensure that such appropriation is not transformed into the vile practice of simple plagiarism. Many people have collaborated with me in the task of constructing this text. Therefore, many can share in its merits but not, of course, in its defects, which are solely the result of my own thoughtlessness or inability to present ideas and concepts clearly. I must also now thank the many people who have made possible this newly revised edition, updated and prepared especially for an English-speaking audience. I must acknowledge first the help of Guillermo Levy, a friend since adoles- cence who has thought with me about these issues for more than twenty years, always trying to be sure that theoretical analysis should inform political practice. It is difficult to identify in our writings what belongs to whom. We usually can’t recall our original starting position once our discussions end. It does not seem that important, after all. Survivors of the genocides both in Europe and Argentina have a relevant voice in this book, particularly in chapters 1, 6, 8, and 9. The conversations with Charles Papiernik—who lived for almost four years in the Auschwitz concentration camp—lasted through

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