killing and its names

 

It is easy to write “bang bang he’s dead.” The written – on a scroll, a page, a screen – may be bloody, but it doesn’t bleed. The long train of individual deaths,  from Socrates to Ivan Illych, must number in the hundreds of thousands. The deaths of both Hector, who could be a fiction, and Sinead O’Connor, who was not a fiction, are written down in the same way

In history, the same rule of course applies, even to mass deaths. I can write about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising: “A total of 13,000 Jews were killed, about half of them burnt alive or suffocated.” That is 13,000 individual bodies. But there’s no special grammar or diacritics that distinguishes this from writing a note about the plums in the refrigerator.

We write to commemorate, but of course although we can remember blood, memory doesn’t bleed, either.

Of course, writing is confounded and interlocked with acts, events, institutions, lifestyles, etc. In jurisprudence, the judge “sentences”. The judge says, and the judge writes. The orders given to the Naza soldiers in Warsaw and the report by the commander, Stroop, were written. Writing is an instrument of coercion and liberation, but it is firstly and always a bloodless thing. This, for a writer, is a hard law. You cannot be a writer, a real writer, and think that your writing is not, somehow, alive, does not have a separate existence.

Which gets us to the subject that I have, given our circumstances, been thinking about a lot: the word “genocide”.

I don’t like the word.

Now, Tennyson didn’t like the word scissors, supposedly, but scissors is, I would say, a harmless word to name the things I cut paper and cloth with. Perhaps the word brought out some hidden lisp in Tennyson. I can sympathize – when I was a child, I had a lisp that was taken care of by a speech therapist who took me out of my classes and had me do phonic exercises.

The word genocide, though, unlike scissors, is a very document bound word. It is in the family of -ide – homicide, suicide, etc. Like those words, it is vaguely juridical. It is not slaughter. It is not even murder or killing. It freezes the tears of things. It doesn’t speak of being suffocated to death in a traincar, dying in your shit. It doesn’t suggest the look of a child whose face has been ripped off.

Genocide, though, has had a large life after the Nazis massmurdered the Jews and Gypsies. It is chanted, for instant, in protests. Charging someone with genocide/who can’t hide – I have definitely chanted that before and, alas, probably will again. But I feel that, though it is invested with the gravest and vilest acts that an armed force can commit against another, it loses the ultimate horror of the individual killing – the horror felt by the killed, even. The horror, even, of being killed by people who are not worthy of killing you.

If that makes sense.

The mass murder in Gaza, which has now taken twice the number of victims killed in the Warsaw Ghetto result, might be genocide according to the courts. But to my mind it is first and foremost a mass murder.

The German mass murderers suffered various fates. Some were hung by the courts, like Rudolf Hoess. Some became rocket scientists in the U.S. and have streets named after them, like Werner von Braun. Some became the head of intelligence agencies, like Gehen in West Germany. And surely the Israeli mass murderers will have various fates. But to absorb this crime, spiritually, the crime that is still unfolding will take decades.