By LUIZ RENATO MARTINS*

In the firing line are the cursed and unfortunate of the Earth. For these potential refugees, fate is being prepared in incubators where new forms of genocidal practices proliferate.

Genocide, environmental devastation or ecocide, and the state of permanent war (whether civil or between states) constitute inseparable faces of the current (unequal but globally combined) stage of late capitalism. Among the tips of this immense iceberg, I will prioritize here the issue of genocide, whose intensification and accelerated mutation of its recent forms mark the present.[I]

Nameless crime

The construction of the legal figure of genocide by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) began in 1933, focusing on the massacre of Armenians in 1915. Concerned with constructing a new legal figure, linked to supranational jurisdiction and international law, Lemkin forged a new word, uniting the terms genos, from the Greek, referring to a common descent, and cidium, from Latin, referring to the action of someone who kills. On the same basis, he established the synonym: ethnocide.[ii]

Raphael Lemkin's work as part of the prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials culminated in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.

What is the purpose of genocide?

Nevertheless, genocidal practices spread in the new capitalist cycle opened by the end of World War II, starting with the nuclear weapons dropped in 1945 on the cities of Hiroshima (August 06.08.1945, 09.08.1945) and Nagasaki (August XNUMX, XNUMX). In the current cycle, genocidal practices have become more varied and more frequent. Philippe Lazzarini, director of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, warns that the war on Gaza promotes what he calls the “trivialization of horror.”[iii]

In this sense, how can we explain our present? Anguish moves me to collect and organize notes and images into montages for collective examination. Since its first legal characterization – as an act of exception and against humanity – the sign of genocide has been linked, since 1967, in the Russell Tribunal against the war crimes of the United States in Vietnam, to the routine of colonial and imperialist war.[iv] Thus, genocide, Sartre (1905-1980) stated, serves the “imperialist total war” against the “people’s war of liberation.”[v]

The era of genocides

Going beyond the strictly sphere militarily, the modernization processes and the economic shock measures that installed the neoliberal model were also designated as genocidal. Thus, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), in 1974, called “cultural genocide” the modernizing effects that “lead, even without massacres and mass shootings, to the suppression of large sections of society”.[vi] At the same time, Pasolini made the film Salò (1975) a double allegory: of the effects of the military coup in Chile (11.09.1973) against the government of Unidad Popular (1970-73) and of the accelerated late modernization in Italy.[vii]

The use of this sign soon multiplied – a contradiction that denoted, on the one hand, from a critical point of view, greater attention to the value of life and, on the other, as an infectious focus, the new level of labor exploitation. In 1976, the economist André Gunder-Frank (1929-2005) described it as “economic genocide.”[viii] the shock plan in Chile of the so-called Chicago Boys.

In March 1977, the Argentine writer Rodolfo Walsh (1927-1977), who was later assassinated, labeled the neoliberal plan of the Argentine civil-military dictatorship (1976-83) as “planned poverty.”[ix] Similarly, in 1978, the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), alluding to structural racism in addition to state terror, pointed out, upon returning to the country after years of self-exile abroad, an extermination underway: “Do you know what I discovered? That there is a program of genocide (…) most of the people I knew in Mangueira are either imprisoned or have been murdered.”[X]

In 1979-80, in a sharp essay, Le Sucre et la Faim, about peasant work in the Brazilian Northeast, the French writer Robert Linhart used the figures of the “concentration camp” and the “nuclear bomb” to describe the dispossession of housing and the deregulation of work, in the wake of dictatorial decrees[xi] against the opposition in Brazil.

In September 2006, the term genocide, combined with that of state terror, was defined by Argentine magistrates in a ruling based on the unanimous resolution of the UN General Assembly in 1946 on the crime of genocide.[xii] Also in 2006, historian Ilan Pappé published the work The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, [xiii] based on an extensive collection of official Israeli documents and Palestinian accounts of the process of ethnic cleansing to establish the State of Israel, which succeeded the British colonial mandate in 1947. Ilan Pappé's research led to his expulsion from Israel in 2007.

Based on the archives of the Zionist Patriarch and founding Prime Minister (of the State of Israel) David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) and focused on the period 1947-49 – what Palestinians call Nakba (the Palestinian term for catastrophe) – Ilan Pappé's book also goes back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement, to point out the doctrinal roots and terms of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and conquest of Palestine since the 1880s.

We also rely on Naomi Klein's research on the history and systemic content of accumulation by dispossession: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)[xiv] Antony Loewenstein's current investigations, discussed below, provide more information about the disaster capitalism, as well as the systemic function of the State of Israel as a laboratory for the expansion of global capitalism.

Mutations

In parallel with Lemkin's concern, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) pointed out the need in his Thesis VIII on The Concept of History “to achieve a concept of history that corresponds to the 'state of exception' (…) in which we are living”.[xv]

Today we see constitutive mutations in the figure of genocide. With their variety and broad visibility, they nourish the principleio of current reality – reorganized around financialization and structural unemployment, the techno-arms race and the intense militarization of the State –, incorporating, at the molecular level, subjective training for war, via mass entertainment expedients. A pre-war logic governs the so-called leisure time. Agreements supported by sectors that endorse dispossessions (at gunpoint or otherwise), environmental and health denialism, failure to provide aid, with a classist and racist tone, typify the new genocidal practices currently in force.[xvi] Being blatant and publicized, such global changes are qualitatively and quantitatively new.

State of exception as a laboratory

Can we then consider that our time is characterized by the contrast between critical progress in determining the variety of genocidal practices and, on the other hand, by the dissemination and widespread acceptance of these same practices? Let us consider the war against Gaza, today the most aberrant example and the most advanced case – from which other cases may derive. If it is unnecessary, in this audience, to recall the ongoing horrors, it is worth asking: why do they continue?

Loewenstein, in The Palestine Laboratory, explains: “…Israel sees at this moment an opportunity to finish the work begun in 1948: to produce a Nakba of biblical proportions, capable of forever dispersing Palestinian identity to the four corners of the world.” [xvii]

Undoubtedly, Ilan Pappé, in the book cited above, reveals a vast and coordinated process, before and after the installation of the Zionist state in 1947-49, of erasing traces of the past and producing a new memory. In this sense, practically all signs of pre-1948 Palestinian life were systematically removed to be covered by Zionist signs, new names, narratives and various stories, disseminated in pamphlets, tourist signs and other media, as if such elements originally belonged to the everyday colloquialism of the territories seized from the existing villages and cities.

The myth of an empty and uninhabited Palestine was spread in an orchestrated manner. A scholarly working group even provided immemorial biblical references to be superimposed on every word or trace of the centuries-old Palestinian occupation of the region. According to Ilan Pappé, these procedures resulted in a newspeak and an active regime of apartheid which, in addition to the many it expelled, segregates the remaining contingent of former inhabitants.

Construction of Newspeak

Loewenstein explains a key episode of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, based on the report given by the journalist from New York Times, Thomas Friedman, in his 1998 book on the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem:

Two targets in particular seemed to interest Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no weapons, no ammunition, no fighters. But there was something more dangerous: books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs of Arab life in Palestine, historical archives of Arab life in Palestine, and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine, depicting all the Arab villages before the state of Israel came along and wiped out many of them. The Research Center was like a chest containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation.

In a way, this was what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. It was evident in the graffiti the Israeli boys left on the walls of the Research Center: “Palestinians? What is this? Fuck the Palestinians; and Arafat, I will fuck your mother.” (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a prisoner exchange in November 1983.)[xviii]

In short, Loewenstein’s investigation, focused on the present day, expands on Ilan Pappé’s investigation, adding evidence of the functionality and relevance of the Zionist state as a global export hub, in addition to weapons, of “technology for occupation of the world”. But that’s not all, as we’ll see.

Foundations and inputs of the global state of exception

In fact, the project to establish the State of Israel now has – and has had before – the active support (financial, political and weapons) of the imperialist powers (old and new), united under the motto that “Israel has the right to defend itself”; a motto that Ilan Pappé refutes in a recent interview: “The war in Gaza is not self-defense, but genocide.”[xx]

How can we explain the permanent support of the central economies for the liquidation of Palestinian society? It is clear that the State of Israel, as an experiment, besides being colonial and imperial, as Ilan Pappé pointed out, has a function that the G7 governments preserve and reproduce. What is it? That of an advanced laboratory, as Loewenstein's book points out.

Crucial and interrelated objectives are on the agenda of such a laboratory: the removal of poor populations, opening up territories and free access – guess who and for what – to the exploitation of raw materials. In short, the aim is to create a new cycle of accumulation.

In fact, what could condense more functionality than the extinction or extermination of poor populations, in the current cycle – which is that of structural unemployment and the expansion of what Claude Serfati called armed globalization, under the hegemony of fictitious capital?[xx] The utopia of capital is that of automated production, or with minimum levels of human labor. The implantation of prostheses of social formation, without origin in the field and concrete ethnographic links – and therefore predisposed to assimilate narrative devices or fictitious originary marks, such as tattoos –, serves this utopia.

The State of Israel constitutes a similar experiment in artificial social formation and reproduction. The experiments underway in Silicon Valley (California) build artificial intelligence models on another scale and context, but no less systemic and strategic.

“Time is money”

Forge a newspeak, invent imaginary landmarks, hastily plant natural reserves, sweeten forms of entertainment in edifying tones, resorts and service stations for settlers – where there were once villages, cemeteries and mosques, and where massacres took place, as listed and documented in the book Pappé –; certainly, this is in no way new or deviates from the broad lines of the modern colonial process. After all, this was how the structures of production and leisure were created in the Americas, at the expense of the uses and meanings of the lands of the Amerindian populations.

War park – didactic and practical utility

However, the contraction of the historical-temporal duration that allowed the intensely militarized experiment of a Disney-State, installed in the course of one or two generations, is unprecedented. Therefore, the key “time is money” explains the crucial value of the current experiment, of an amusement park or war attractions, with techniques of dispossession ready for use and commissioned by advanced capitalism. That said, the State of Israel does not rely only on techniques of social control and state-of-the-art weapons, but also on a culture almost and false, forming mobile contingents of colonists.

Consequently, if the experiment completes its project, each zone of rarefied or scarce monetization and predominance of subsistence economic activities will become a potential prey. Episodes of serial assault and dispossession may occur even before the occupation of the poles of the globe, now in thawing, or of colonizing incursions on other planets.

Initiatives already underway globally contribute to this: industrial reconversion in favor of techno-armament (exemplified by the recent replacement of the military leadership of the Russian Ministry of Defense by a much younger economist) and the militaristic and mass-scale training of subjectivities, now trained for permanent war. The exercises are taking place incessantly and with unprecedented capillarity. Riding the cyber networks, these hosts, tinkled by the hate speeches of the far-right movements, feed the neocolonial reserve armies, fueled by short stories. geek and lexical devices Disney, Marvel etc…

New Gazas: lands of the penniless

In the firing line are the cursed and unfortunate of the Earth. For these potential refugees, fate is being prepared in incubators where new forms of genocidal practices proliferate, many indirectly (under the guise of control and screening). When this happens, as Benjamin’s Thesis VI says, “not even the dead will be safe (…)”.[xxx] This is why Andreas Malm says: “The destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the Earth.”[xxiii]

(I thank Nicholas Brown for his comments and help in finalizing the English translation, as well as Regina Araki for reviewing the present Portuguese version).

*Luiz Renato Martins is a professor-advisor of the PPG in Visual Arts (ECA-USP); author, among other books, of The Long Roots of Formalism in Brazil (Chicago, Haymarket/HMBS).

Notes

[I] Edited version of the notes for the paper presented on 10.11.2024 at the panel “On Genocide”, also composed of Bruna Della Torre, Gustavo Motta and Claude Serfati, at the Historical Materialism 2024 – 21st Annual Conference, Countering the Plague: Forces of Reaction and War and How to Fight Them, London, School of Oriental and African Studies – SOAS, University of London, 07-10 November 2022.

[ii] See Olivier Beauvallet, Face au Génocide/ Suivi d´un Texte Inédit de Raphaël Lemkin, Paris, Michalon Éditions, 2011. Alongside detailed legal analyses, the book also contains aspects of a novel of formation and fall, from the opening sentence: “On August 28, 1959, Raphaël Lemkin died in New York, as an indigent”.

[iii] Philippe LAZZARINI apud Beatriz LECUMBERRI in “Jefe de la UNRWA: '10 months and 40.000 deaths later, the suffering of the gazatíes has become something abstract'”, El País, 23.08.2024, available at https://elpais.com/planeta-futuro/2024-08-23/jefe-de-la-unrwa-10-meses-y-40000-muertos-despues-el-sufrimiento-de-los-gazaties-se-ha-convertido-en-algo-abstracto.html.

[iv] See Jean-Paul SARTRE, “Genocide” (“Le Génocide”, in Modern Times, 259, Paris, Presses, December, 1967, pp. 953-71), in New Left Review, n. 48, London, March/April, 1968, pp. 13-25.

[v] On the concept of “total war,” see idem, “Genocide,” op. cit., pp. 14–5; on “cultural genocide,” see idem, p. 16; on “people’s war” and genocide and torture as imperialist responses to the latter, see idem, p. 17.

[vi] Cf. PP Pasolini, “Il genocidio”, op. cit., p. 281; idem, “O genocídio”, op. cit., p. 263. Pasolini began to insistently use the term as a critical category, since an oral intervention at the newspaper party Unity (1924-2014) in Milan, in the summer of 1974.

[vii] See LR Martins, “The era of genocides/ First part of an article on the situation and impacts of the coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende” [2015], in The Earth is Round, https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/a-era-dos-genocidios/, 30.09.2021/XNUMX/XNUMX. For the second part, see “The era of genocides…”, in the earth is round, https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/a-era-dos-genocidios-ii/, 22.10.2021, both accessed on 20.11.2024. The two parts constitute the written version of the work “La era de los genocidios”, opening conference of the seminar Estado(s) del Neobileralismo/ IX Escuela Chile-Francia – Michel Foucault Chair, at the University of Chile (04-06.05.2015), on 04.05.2015.

[viii] See André GUNDER FRANK, Capitalism and Economic Genocide / Open Letter to the Economic School of Chicago and its Intervention in Chile, “Lee y Discuss” collection, series V, number 67, Bilbao, Zero, 1976.

[ix] See Rodolfo WALSH, Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Board (March 24, 1977), Buenos Aires, Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti/ Series Recursos para el Aula, Ministerio de Justicia, Seguridad y Derechos Humanos de la Nación, 2010, p. 11.

[X] Cf. H. OITICICA, in “Um mito vadio”, testimony [my italics] to Jary Cardoso, in the newspaper FSP, 05.11.1978/XNUMX/XNUMX, rep. in César OITICICA Filho, et. al. (orgs.), Hélio Oiticica – Encounters, Rio de Janeiro, Azougue, 2009, pp. 215-6. For a letter from Oiticica related to the issue and the preliminary protocol (albeit handwritten and in draft form) for an installation by Oiticica called the round of death, see idem, work (documentation) exhibited at the 34th São Paulo Biennial, Biennial Pavilion, Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo, 04.09 – 05.12.2021; see reproduction in Elvira Dyangani OSE (ed.), Jacopo Crivelli VISCONTI et al. (cur.), 34th Bienal de São Paulo / It's Dark But I Sing, exhibition catalogue, São Paulo, São Paulo International Biennial, 2021, p. 196.

[xi] Institutional Act No. 5, of 13.12.1969/1964/1964, was decreed after a crescendo of left-wing and mass cultural demonstrations in the streets. On the cultural movement of protest and resistance to the 1969 military-business coup, see Roberto SCHWARZ, “Culture and Politics, XNUMX-XNUMX: Some Schemes”, in The Father of the Family and Other Studies, São Paulo, Paz e Terra, 1992, pp. 61-92. See also MARTINS, LR “The New Figuration as negation”, in magazine ARS/ Journal of the Postgraduate Program in Visual Arts, n. 8, São Paulo, Postgraduate Program in Visual Arts/ Department of Plastic Arts, School of Communications and Arts, University of São Paulo, 2007, pp. 62-71.

[xii] On 11.12.1946, the UN General Assembly passed a unanimous resolution establishing genocide “when racial, religious, political and other groups are destroyed in whole or in part”. At the request of Stalin (1878-1953), the reference to extermination for political reasons was suppressed by the UN two years later, on 09.12.1948, for the signing of the above-mentioned Convention. However, Argentine magistrate Carlos Rozanski revived, in a ruling from September 2006, the first UN resolution that defined genocide as political genocide. For details on the legal discussion of the notion of genocide adopted by the Argentine justice system, based on the first definition inscribed in the UN Charter, see N. KLEIN, The Shock…, op. cit., pp. 124-5; idem, The Doctrine…, op. cit., pp. 126-7.

[xiii] See Ilan PAPPE, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford, Oneworld publications, 2006 [ed. br.: ditto, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, translated by Luiz Gustavo Soares, New York, Sundermann, 2016].

[xiv] Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York, Picador, 2007.

[xv] Thesis VIII begins: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' (State of Emergency), in which we are living, is the rule. We need to achieve a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will see that our task is to induce an effective state of exception; and in this way, our position in the fight against fascism will improve.” Cf. Walter BENJAMIN, About the concept of history/ Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Adalberto Muller and Márcio Seligmann-Silva, notes by M. Seligmann-Silva, quoted from version T1 – Benjamin’s personal copy, p. 75.

[xvi] For detailed accounts of genocidal episodes triggered by the constant application of control and surveillance technologies, including drones and other tools developed by Israeli industries and intensively used by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) against waves of refugees seeking to enter Europe and who, often deliberately left unattended and abandoned to their fate, die en masse at sea, see Chapter 4, “Selling the Israeli Occupation to the World,” of Antony Loewenstein’s remarkable investigative work, discussed below, Palestine Lab: How Israel Exports Occupation Technology to the World, translated by Gabriel Rocha Gaspar, ed. by Luiza Brandino and Tadeu Breda, New York, Elefante Publishing, 2024, pp. 165-95.

[xvii] Cf. A. LoEwenstein, “Preface to the Brazilian ed.”, in op. cit., p. 13.

[xviii] Thomas FRIEDMAN, From Beirut to Jerusalem. One Man's Middle East Odyssey, New York, Harper Collins, 1998, p. 159 [ed. bras.: From Beirut to Jerusalem, trans. Elena Gaidano, Rio de Janeiro, Bertrand Brasil, 1991] apoud A. LOEWENSTEIN, on. cit., pp. 81-2. In the oral presentation of the work, on 10.11.24, this excerpt, based on Friedman's book, was omitted to save time. Similarly, the preamble and intertitles belong only to the written version.

[xx] Cf. Ilan PAPPÉ, “The Gaza war is not self-defense but genocide”, trans. Antoni Soy Casals, interview with Rachida El Azzouzi, Mediapart, available at https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/240624/ilan-pappe-la-guerre-gaza-n-est-pas-de-l-autodefense-mais-un-genocide; rep. in Without permission, 30.06.2024, available at https://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/ilan-pappe-la-guerra-de-gaza-no-es-autodefensa-sino-genocidio. Accessed on 20.11.24.

[xx] See Claude SERFATI, L'État Radicalisé/ La France à l'Ère de la Mondialisation Armée, Paris, La Fabrique Éditions, 2022. See also the most recent development of his investigation into the arms race in idem, A World at War, Paris, Textuel, 2024.

[xxx] See Walter BENJAMIN, About the concept of history/ Critical Edition, op. cit., p. 70.

[xxiii] See Andreas MALM, The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Planet, trans. Natalia Engler, ed. Tadeu Breda, 2024.

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