Genocide

Four words, and the whole argument is in the last one. A nation in this framework is not a state but layered and overlapping societies gathered for community, cooperation and sharing, existing across borders and generations, held together by animus carried in rites, objects, land and culture. Killing a nation therefore does not require killing all of its people, since a nation can be destroyed by destroying what connects it across space and time, and conversely a great many deaths without that destruction are not genocide on this definition. It also accounts for why colonization, defined as sublation of the will and animus of a nation, sits so close to it. Marsh gives the process a sequence, and it is the same sequence as ordinary endosocial abuse at smaller scale: identification, melding, threat assignment, guilt assignment, curse, shunning, punishment and final guilt reversal for the punishment. That last step is what produces the familiar spectacle of perpetrators claiming victimhood over the people they have killed. She treats the groundwork as long and visible. Where tyranny appears suddenly, empathy has usually been eroded for decades by endemic cruelty towards the negative image, and many early victims are targeted through autogenocide, which is genocide instigated remotely rather than administered directly. Her account of professional complicity is direct, since she reports psychiatry being called the father of genocide for its role in advocating and enabling it.

Raphael Lemkin coined genocide in 1944 and his original conception was broader than the treaty that followed, covering the destruction of a group's culture, language and institutions rather than only its members. The 1948 Convention narrowed it to acts committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, and the concept of cultural genocide was deliberately excluded, a decision scholars have contested ever since. Gregory Stanton's 10 stages of genocide is the best known process model. Marsh's definition returns to something closer to Lemkin's original scope by defining the victim as a nation in her own sense, which restores the cultural dimension the Convention removed and makes the destruction of connection sufficient.