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State Violence, Justice, And The Suffering Of Others
Review products
Carolyn J.Dean, The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)
EmmaKuby, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps after 1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2021
Extract
In 1955, Alain Resnais's now canonical documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) ended with an ominous question, asking “who, among us, is keeping watch from this strange watchtower [of the ruins of Auschwitz] to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” who might bring about the return of the “concentrationary plague?” One man had already made it his mission to do so: the French writer and former political deportee David Rousset. Rousset had shaken the French world of letters and politics with the 1946 publication of L'univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), which warned of the civilizational and moral cesura that the Nazi camps had been. The term quickly became a widely used conceptual framework. Former deportee and Catholic writer Jean Cayrol borrowed from it to write his voice-over to Night and Fog. In 1949, Rousset published another text that created a scandal in Cold War France: an Appeal to “fellow deportees” calling upon them to “investigate the USSR's concentrationary universe” (Kuby, 46). This indictment fiercely divided the French left. In 1950, he brought a libel suit against another former deportee, communist writer Pierre Daix, who had accused him of amnesiac “apoliticism” (Kuby, 65–6; Dean, 61). Just before, in the wake of his Appeal, Rousset had founded an organization against concentrationary regimes with those, like him, who had been political deportees. In 1951, it put the Soviet Union on trial for crimes against humanity. Rousset and his organization were involved in many trials, eager to denounce the “new executioners” who had revived the “scourge of the camps” in the postwar world. For many today, he is an “exceptional” man because, as philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov argues, he was not paralyzed by the memory of “this painful experience”; instead, he harnessed it into action against dehumanizing state violence. For Todorov, Rousset had allowed morality to prevail over base political considerations.
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References
1 Jean Cayrol, Night and Fog (1955).
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18 See, for instance, Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, and Claudio Fogu, eds., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham, NC, 2006).
19 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 310, 309. Mid- to late twentieth-century French debates have intensely focused on the question of memory, with invocations of devoir de mémoire, guerre des mémoires, or concurrence mémorielle.
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29 “Horror” is the trope deployed by postwar actors when referring to the Nazi project. Kuby, Political Survivors, 10.
30 Moyn, Samuel, in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar, argues that decolonization cannot constitute a “human rights discourse” because decolonization concerns national sovereignty rather than the transcendent and universalizing moral categories of human rights.
31 S21 formed the centerpiece of the Khmer's murderous policies resulting in the death of “somewhere between 1.7 and 2.2 million” Cambodian, men, women, and children. The interrogation and torture prison S21 is recorded to have claimed 18,133 lives. Only seven are known to have survived S21 and only five testified at the trial, which was an international affair, the result of tense negotiations between Cambodian authorities and international human rights organizations. Historians have argued that the violence of the Khmer regime must be conceptualized within a longer genealogy dating back to French colonial rule. On S21 see Elander, Figuring Victims, 54. See also Chandler, David G., Voices from S21 (Berkeley, 1999), 6–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Caswell, Michelle, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (Madison, 2014)Google Scholar.
32 Elander, Figuring Victims, 76.
33 Survivors testified as “civil parties.” Only, the best-known S21 survivor, Vann Nath, testified “the facts … seen [and] heard” in the manner of the “global victim” described by Dean. Elander, Figuring Victims, 108, 135.
34 Lowe, The Intimacy of Four Continents, 2.
35 Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 10. The same applies to discussion of visual culture and how atrocity photography, for instance, has been harnessed in service of post-traumatic generic witness. However, this genealogy is a much longer one than Dean covers. For instance, see Sherman's discussion of Norton Cru in The Construction of Memory in Interwar France, 18. On a case that complicates our understanding of atrocity photography, see Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable.
36 On “globalizing” intellectual history see Moyn, Samuel and Sartori, Andrew, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of intellectual history's anxiety in the face of its “provincialization” see Specter, Mathew, “Deprovincializing the Study of European Ideas: A Critique,” History and Theory 55 (2016), 110–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zimmerman, Andrew, “Guinea Sam Nightingale Magic Marx in Civil Missouri: Provincializing Global History and Decolonizing Theory,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 8/2 (2018), 140–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 142.
37 Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, viii.