In this episode, we welcome Henry C. Theriault, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Worcester State University. Theriault delves into his research on genocide denial, prevention, and reparations, discussing his work with the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group. Join us as we explore the complexities of post-genocide relations, mass violence against women and girls, and the quest for justice and accountability in the aftermath of atrocities.
But just creating the democracy is not enough. We need to do and a lot of people do this real deep education to give a certain moral character to that democracy that will make it anti-genocidal. And I have to be honest, if you look at genocides, I’m sorry, if you look at democracies around the world and again, we can debate, you know, different countries, including United States, is a true democracy. I don’t want to get into that. You know, we haven’t done a very good job of this. This is Not to Forgive, but to Understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Henry Theriault is the associate vice president for academic affairs at Worcester State University. With a distinguished career in philosophy and genocide studies, Theriault has chaired WSU’s philosophy department and coordinated its Human Rights Center. He has authored Pivotal Works on Denial, Reparations, and Mass Violence against women and girls, and served as president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Hello, Henry. We are here to discuss, among many other things, genocide denial. I prepared two sets of questions. I prepared to pass, rather to this interview. The first one is about your paper on denial. And the second part is about reparations. The reparations committee that you were part of, where you discussed in detail the proposals going forward to make reparations for the Armenian genocide. The questions I have for you are as follows Gregory Stanton comes up with the ten stages of genocide. He cites classifications, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and finally, denial. Let’s speak about the last stage denial. It’s not just Stanton, I think, who speaks about it as a last stage, but also any Elie Wiesel That’s what I gathered from the article that you wrote, now for denial Stanton says, that I quote “It is a final stage that lasts throughout. It always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocide, genocidal massacres, the perpetrators of genocide. Dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes and continue to govern until driven from power by force. When they flee into exile there, they remain with impunity. Like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal, is established to try them. The response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts. There the evidence can be heard and the perpetrators punished. Tribunals like the Yugoslav or Rwandan tribunals or an international tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, when international Criminal Court may not deter the worst genocidal killers, but with the political will to arrest and prosecute them. Some may be brought to justice.” Now, there have been many critiques of this stance by Stanton, one of the principle ones often cited by scholars in the field is by you. In a 2021 paper titled “Is denial the final stage of genocide? Consolidation, the metaphysics of denial, and the supersession of stage theory”. What is the premise of the paper? So, yeah. So thank you for asking the question. You know, there are a number of aspects of the concerns I have about the approach. The first most basic one is I think it’s a misunderstanding of denial to see it as a stage of anything. Denial is a method similar to killing, sexual assault and so forth that’s used in the process of genocide. And it certainly exists as genocides are being perpetrated. And, you know, I’ve adopted the position following Fatma Müge Göçek in an earlier work of hers on, called Denial of violence on sort of violence against Armenians and others in the Ottoman Empire and into Turkey. That denial actually pre-exists genocidal violence. And if you think about this, this is actually not as counterintuitive as it sounds, because one needs to deny the evidence of prejudice, the evidence of oppression and so forth that almost inevitably preexisted genocide in order to sort of create the conditions that that make it possible to commit genocide, both from a perspective of outside potential interveners, but also internally within a society. And so denial is present at every sort of pre post and during just every sort of every moment. And it functions in different ways. So I think calling it a stages is misleading and causes some problems. That’s not to say that denial is not incredibly important after the direct phase of a genocide is completed, although we can talk about whether genocides are completed in the sense that that we we often want to think it doesn’t mean that. But what it does mean is denial is not present as a stage. We don’t move from killing to something, you know, whatever it is, to denial, something like that. It’s a very different kind of thing. So that’s the first issue. The second issue is that if you must go with some kind of a stage theory, and I’ll talk about that in a moment, really consolidation is the final stage of genocide. And what I mean by consolidation is the process by which the results of a genocide become irrevocable. They become a permanent, normal state of affairs within the world. So, for instance, if you look at the United States and indigenous peoples, certainly if you look at the East Coast of the United States, the destruction, even though there are Native American groups that are still very active, pushing for reparations and so forth, the process of consolidation is profound, right? Land is controlled. It’s a kind of property within a US capitalist system. Their land is almost all taken by others. Right. And occupied by others in a way that’s gone back centuries. Preexisting the United States in fact and it’s one example, right. The attitudes about whether you know what happened, how it happened, why it happened, all those kinds of things are very fixed. And ultimately, with consolidation, you get to the point where a genocide is completed in the sense that it’s results become part of the global order. And we see this in a lot of other cases. And this is true even of genocides that I will call that are there are things like the Holocaust that have been very, very well engaged. There have been responses, even reparative processes. Right. At some point, those reparative processes, which are always limited, even in the case of the Holocaust, the reparations process has been profoundly limited and for me, very inadequate. There’s a point where that kind of ends. In some cases, the consolidation still allows for the memory of a case of genocide and some ongoing attention to it and rectification. But ultimately, even that just gets folded into the order of the world. Right. And so the whole you know, there’s a sort of continuum of how much what level of consolidation at the other end you can think of groups within, say, the Amazon Basin, right, that have been entirely wiped out and with them, you know, being wiped out. Right. Their land everything their existence is just is gone. And so the consolidation process is a complete elimination of them even from historical memory. Right. So that’s sort of the continuum. The other thing I would add is that and maybe this is a bit of the postmodern influence on me, I’m not I wouldn’t call myself a postmodernist, but I’m certainly, you know, was certainly heavily influenced by continental philosophy in my earlier career that a stage theory itself really begs a lot of questions, right? Do events unfold in stages? Do we think of linear processes in some simplified step by step way? Conceptually, that can be very useful. I would say if I’m talking to high school students stage theory is not the worst thing because it helps them get some kind of understanding of how mass violence happens. Right. It gives them something to hold on to. But it’s woefully inadequate and incomplete for scholars to think in those terms. And if we really understand, you know, and then, you know, in response to a lot of these kinds of criticisms over the years, Stanton and others have said while they don’t mean literal stage theory, it’s not that it has to be linear in the same order all the time. It’s not that all the stages need to be present and so forth and so on. Right? And we even can think of at least some of the U.N. convention and certainly other definitions, a genocide where lethal violence is not very central or even possibly not present, although case law would suggest you need some level of lethal violence for something to qualify in practice, in the international legal realm as a genocide. So we start to understand, yeah, okay. So we start looking at stage theory and we realize, wow, it’s not necessarily the order doesn’t necessarily matter. The stages don’t need to be there, right? You could have five out of the ten or four out of the ten or whatever. And in the process itself might not be non-linear. One of the things for me that’s very important understanding genocide is that genocides can be cyclical as well. I do not mean cycles of violence where perpetrators and victim go back and forth. I think that is another problem in in genocide studies that that people sort of latch on to that model too quickly. And I think historically that’s very rarely the case. It’s usually victims who continue to be victimized in the long aftermath of a genocide and quite often to sort of final extinction. And we can see this in various cases, it’s that genocides can follow a repetitive pattern. You can have multiple sort of things that you could pass as genocide. I’m looking at what Armenians are experiencing now, what they just experienced in the elimination of Armenian by Azerbaijan in Turkey, and the genocidal intent that’s been expressed by both Erdogan and Aliyev and the actual invasion of Armenian territory right now. And the and the intent to get rid of Armenians from the entire Caucasus region as another cycle in 130 year process of genocide that began with the 1894-96 massacres under a previous regime, Sultan Abdul Hamid’s regime in the in the sort of waning days of the Ottoman Empire, and then the young Turk process of genocide from 1915 to 1918, and then the Republican Turkish process from 1918, 1919 until 1923, when, for instance, Armenians who attempted to return to their homes in different places in the new Turkey were actually massacres to massacre to prevent the return of a sizable Armenian population. Right. So this is more of a cyclical process, right? You have a genocide. You have some time, you know, I’ll call it a kind of static period where the violence is still ready to happen. It’s kind of latent, but it’s not actively being executed by the perpetrators. And then something happens, conditions change. The opportunity to sort of complete the next stage happens and then you have the next cycle. And I think stage theory really misunderstands those kinds of long trajectories. And when we’re looking at indigenous peoples, Armenians are indigenous to that area. But if you’re looking especially at those who we consider indigenous in North America, for instance, Canada and the U.S. and we could talk about Australia as well, we see this sort of cycle, right? You have direct violence, say, in the in the continental United States, Western half sort of west of the Mississippi. You have direct violence in in in all sorts of complicated ways through throughout the 19th century. But in the 20th century, what you have is, is a new sort of method of genocide using the boarding schools and using different kinds of law that broke property rights of native Americans to hold property communally, which was their traditional way, and also allowed them to retain community identity. And you have all these processes happening in the 20th century, some assassinations, some killing. But that was not the predominant prominent feature as another cycle of genocide to sort of take this residual population that survived and then subject them again to some kind of new process of genocide. So I’ll stop there. But that hopefully gives you some idea of where I’m coming from in this critique and and I think there are a lot of other things to say about it, but this should give maybe three points that would be helpful for the audience. Yes, absolutely. Thank you. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. And I think what is interesting here for me in particular is the idea that these cycles of violence or rather not the cycles of violence. Exactly. But that the attacks against a particular group can be recurrent. That something that I’d probably be overlooked while studying subject. Okay. So I have a second question about the approach you have generally to some of the papers you’ve written. So I think there’s a second paper that interests me where you again called into question one more stage that we spoke about the ten stages. So another stage that you called into question was dehumanization. So in a different paper you delved into how you know what happens, because we recognize it as a fact, as a truism that there is dehumanization before the process of attack, killing, violence takes place. You said that it’s not exactly that. Could you elaborate further? Yeah. First, let me give a sort of global comment. You’ve highlighted a certain tendency that I have to question. You use the term truism. I think that’s a useful thought in genocide studies and other, you know, human rights studies and even for political science more generally in certain other areas, there are ideas that are legitimate, that are based on, you know, some empirical evidence, but that you get a kind of cachet or have an impact that far outweighs the empirical basis for those ideas. So, for instance, you know, we talk about denial. Yeah, denial does happen after a genocide. But to say then it’s a stage of genocide is really overreaching and misunderstanding. In the case of dehumanization, it’s a little bit more direct in this way. And this was not a response to the ten stages at all. This is a response to the wealth of work that says dehumanization is a condition that has to be met or is typically met as a way of understanding how large groups of people are mobilized to commit genocide when otherwise they would. So there are a number of issues there, and I’ll get to the violence tendency question in a moment. But the first point would be dehumanization is present in a lot of cases. We see it, I mean, as clear evidence of it. But when people look at that as the empirical basis of why genocides can happen, why people are willing to participate in genocide, they’re ignoring other evidence. In a lot of cases there there are I mean, actually, in any case of genocide, what you always have is excessive cruelty and a kind of torture that is not the kind of torture that is practiced against beings or even objects that cannot feel and experience. It’s the kind of torture that makes sense only when you’re dealing with human beings. I’ll give you a very simple example. The taking of children or the killing of children in front of parents and mothers who are often left with the children. After men in the community are killed or separated. And so and if your goal is simply to eliminate a population in a kind of cold, calculated way, which is the myth, something of the myth we have of the Nazis, by the way, I think there was a lot of cruelty that we don’t see all the time because of this idea of sort of cold calculation kind of thing. The Eichmann model, if we can say it that way. But but if you’re simply trying to get rid of a population, most or much of the violence that happens in a genocide is not only unnecessary, but it’s counterproductive. It takes time, it takes effort, it derails, in some sense, the direct killing process or the direct destruction process. Now, you can argue that there are all sorts of reasons. For instance, sexual violence is used, right? It can terrorize the population, it can break community bonds. And of course, genocide isn’t just about killing people. It’s about or in fact, it might not be about killing people. Primarily. It’s about destroying group cohesion and bonds and the future and so forth. Lisa Forgie’s piece details does a great job of talking about this attack on life force atrocities as the feud trying to break the future of the group. But when we see that that this kind of violence is excessive, we start to realize I or at least I interpret that as the perpetrators understanding fully well that they’re dealing with human beings and they are engaging in violence. So that makes sense again, Again, only if it’s human beings with the full register, right? If you’re dealing with, I don’t know, you know, a very low functioning mammal, say, taking children away probably won’t have a profound effect on the on the mother that they’re taking away from. Right. Killing them in front, you know, something like that. Right. But for a human being that has a profound, traumatizing, permanent effect. Right. If you were to kill a child in front of a mother that, you know, you can see from the survivor testimony that that’s not something people recover from, they might find a way to live. Some of them some of them don’t. But it is always a profound trauma. Right. And so inflicting that kind of violence is it makes it clear to me that people who are perpetrating that kind of violence are thinking about their targets as human beings. I think sexual assault quite often has that component. The way it’s perpetrated in genocide in general doesn’t make sense if we’re talking about if you’re if you really think that the person being assaulted is an inanimate object. And again, the literature is complicated on this. If you look at some of the protocol, you know, in everyday rape and genocide, rape and so forth, it can get complicated. Gang rapes, for instance, you’ll often have perpetrators say they don’t even remember what the woman look like or something like that. I think it’s more complicated than that, right? Because we also have to take perpetrator testimony with a grain of salt and so forth. But there’s also a lot of other kinds of evidence of the cruelty, the violence, the specific targeting of people and so forth. And so that register of violence makes sense as a human being. So that and so my first point would be that I’m not sure that people, average people need to have dehumanized victims in order to do violence. And I would link that. I’ve talked about sexual assault. I would link that to the fact that we have another sort of truism that every day societies aren’t violent, they’re not necessarily mass violent. But if you look at, for instance, the United States, the level of sexual assault, child abuse and general violence in the United States in on any given day is significant, right? It is a very significant amount. And what that means is people are already committing violence. They’re already used to committing violence. Domestic violence is a great example where that’s a long term process of violence that someone repeatedly chooses, despite often feeling bad or whatever. You know, continues to to to engage in and continues to engage in someone who’s an intimate partner, a child, a spouse, a, you know, a significant other of some sort, a parent, whatever it is, who they have to see as human. Right. They can’t they they see them as human, right. That violence is their. And I think that the naïvety that there isn’t already a lot of violence that just needs to be directed in the case of genocide is really misunderstanding. And if I can add a footnote, I think we part of the reason we hold on to that idea of dehumanization is it gives us a kind of hope for humanity. It’s a naive hope, but as long as dehumanization is a key to genocide, then we don’t see people as fundamentally capable of cruelty and violence with a full sort of objective understanding of what they’re doing. We see violence as a mistake. It’s really a Socratic early platonic notion of wrongdoing. Right. Someone does wrongdoing because they’re ignorant, because they don’t understand what the right thing is. And so we think as genocide prevention and also as genocide or rehabilitation of perpetrators and so forth, that we have a we have a path forward. Right. It is a lot harder to face the notion, and I’m including myself in this, that we are all capable of violence and that violence is always happening. And genocide is just a particularly focused and extreme form of the violence that is a kind of constant in human society. And as long as we’re not willing to deal with that constant violence, we’re not going to be preventing genocide. So that’s my first point. Second point would be that if you look at the way that many perpetrators experience what they’re doing, it is not as an average human being killing an ant or kicking a rock, right? It’s not like that, right? If the dehumanization model is correct, then they would be sort of acting as people, sort of, you know, again, you maybe have an ant infestation in your home and you sprayed pesticide. They would experience it like that. They’re not one of the features. And I always think of the Nazi embrace of the Übermensch, that concept of the superior Aryans or godlike, powerful, you know, superhuman, right? They think of themselves as above human beings, right. As in a position of power to decide the fate of human beings, to destroy them. Right. And sometimes through the acts of violence, they get that sense of power. Right? It is a intoxicating. It’s a sick, but it’s intoxicating. And so forth, to the point where I would argue that that itself that sense of power. In an article in denial years ago actually talked about this also functioning as a way of people sort of pushing off their fear of death. Right. If I’m capable of having this power and this ability to destroy others, I’m sort of invincible in the face of death. I control death, all these kinds of ideas. And so I think really an important mechanism that we fail to understand is the superiorization of the of the perpetrators, their sense of superiority and very importantly, exceptionality. The idea that that what they are doing is always justified, that, yes, maybe killing people for normal people isn’t okay, but we have a justification for doing this and we have the right to do it. And that kind of exceptionalism is really dangerous. I’m again, I’m in the US, right? I mean all you as American upbringing and everything and one does not need to look at U.S. history very far empirically foreign policy to see the concept of U.S. exceptionalism being so central to how we think about things. Right. Everybody else should be subject to international law, but we shouldn’t be ever you know, we don’t want other people committing violence and starting wars. But if we think we’re justified, we are going to do that and so forth and so on. Right. And the sort of contradiction between the US does internally and externally and what it says other people should be doing itself is very clear. And this kind of exceptionalism is incredibly dangerous. It’s why for me, even when you can think that, okay, a terrorist act against oppression, some people would justify it as necessary, something like that. It’s why that becomes such a dangerous line to cross. Because once you grant yourself that exceptional status, it changes how you relate to all other people in humanity. As a side note, I just think that what you’re doing is what we should what scholarship should be doing, which is basically and, you know, people set down rules and principles about everything. And I think our duty is to keep questioning them and to basically show how having clear cut, you know, defined outlines and borders to any concept is actually very limiting in our understanding of phenomena. And what you’re doing by questioning how these truisms about denial, about dehumanization should be chucked out of the window, and that we should look at things in the widest sense is absolutely, I think a method that you have that I think is very unique to the way you approach I would add, I wouldn’t say chuck Dehumanization. I think it does have an important role. It does you see it, but it’s alongside this other process that’s very different and they work in different ways. It is true that some people get pulled into a genocidal project who might not otherwise because of dehumanization, because they’re sort of manipulated, all those kinds of things. But there are a lot of other people who for whom that’s not true. And if we really want to understand genocide, we need to be able to face all these different things. And, you know, it’s not easy. The model I have is a lot more cynical about about human beings, human conduct and potential than the the more error based kind of idea of violence. So And so still on the subject, I think what what interests me as well as that conversation that we had a while ago, where you started to where you spoke to me about putting into question the idea that genocidal regimes often spring up under totalitarian or fascist regimes rather than democratic ones. In other words, you claim that genocidal regimes can also emerge where the system of government is democratic. Would you like to tell us more about that? Sure Yeah, and I should I do want to have a footnote here that not all my work is like this. This is a particular strain in my work of questioning some of the, the sort of ideas that have some basis but then become just, you know, almost mantras that people can’t question or just repeat over and over again and so forth. And that closed off or limit real intellectual engagement of things. And I would add also we want to keep in mind. no, sorry. Yeah. We also want to keep in mind and I would say my reparations work tends to be more constructive. It’s not built out of a reaction. This is more reactive work to ideas that are problematic. But we also want to keep in mind genocide is any other socially constructed activity evolves over time. I had written a paper years ago on the on this evolutionary process and looking at the ways in which sophisticated perpetrators, particularly in the in the last 30 to 40 years understand legal questions around genocide. They understand what they might get tried for. And we see it even now, like the way that the genocide is perpetrated now after the Rwanda and former Yugoslavia trials and other things that have happened is different. Perpetrators are smart. They they they cause evolutions in genocide because they don’t want to be subject to the law. So as soon as we get a law in place, perpetrators will find a way around that law. And so genocide itself is a dynamic, evolving process. It’s a sick creativity, but it is nevertheless a creativity. And so we have to be very careful of getting locked into certain ideas that might have applied even in the past, more than they do in the present as things change. So going back to the the the question of democracy and genocide, again, is democracy a good thing? Absolutely given, you know, the Winston Churchill, you know, it’s a terrible form of government, but it’s better than everything else. If I can paraphrase. Right. Every other one is much worse. And and I think that’s true. It has a lot of issues, as we know. I mean, you know, simple things like tyranny of the majority, which we still see saying in us electoral politics today and other kinds of things that happen. It’s manipulable, especially in the age of the Internet. It becomes easier and easier to manipulate people simplistically to vote in certain ways and to participate in their government, their society in certain ways. There are all sorts of problems, right? So basic problems that we’re well aware of. But at the same time, it has a lot of positives that that come in as well. And until we figure out the sort of next evolution in human political structure, you know what the thing you know, democracy emerges as dominant. At some point. There’ll be you know, there’ll be other ideas. You know, I’m kind of partial to the idea of Rand-democracy, where you just randomly choose people to lead more and more convinced this is maybe a Greek old Greek idea. But I’m more and more convinced that picking someone at random would probably give you a better government than than ones that we typically elect within all these sort of problematic processes and, you know, propaganda and all the kinds of things that that now dominate the, you know, for instance, the US political scene. But setting aside for a moment so we don’t know what possibilities. Yeah. And I and I try to think about these things in my hat as a political philosopher and haven’t gone very far. But what new possibilities would be there that could even be better, right? But it becomes very dangerous when we become complacent. Democracy has all sorts of problems. The US slave system was perpetrated by a democratic government. Every genocide perpetrated by the United States internally and externally and the list is long and bloody has been perpetrated by a democratic government. Now we can quibble about it. Some people say, Well, it wasn’t truly democratic, it excluded people and so forth. But democratic governments always have exclusions. In fact, they require exclusions. Right. There has to be. If we go back to Helen Fein’s idea of an in-group and outgroup, there has to be an in-group. Right. And typically, in the age of nation states, the in-group is defined as those citizens within a set of borders. And so those outside, we can see this in US policy, right? If you’re inside the borders, you have certain rights. If you’re outside, you don’t have rights, you know, relative to the US and this is true across most, most states, the internal rights will vary, right? And so there’s always, you know, always with any democracy, there’s the group that actually has democracy relative to the society and there’s everybody else. And everybody else is again using how and science outside the the the universe of moral obligation. And even within many democracies, again, I’ll use the United States, there are always internal marginalization that are happening. And you can you can pick any age in the United States and you’ll see dominant ones and also some other other marginalized nations that are that are less prominent, but still very significant. And so in any democracy, basically the formula for genocide is when that majority that controls electoral power decides that it wants to do violence to or eliminate or in some other way compromise the sort of future of any of these marginalized groups inside or outside its borders. And I would say outside the borders can be easier, right, because of that indirect at a distance kind of thing where you don’t even have to really confront the violence that you’re doing. Right. Which goes a little bit against, you know, maybe that feeds into the dehumanization model a bit. But even internally, that’s very possible. We see this again and again and again. And so and so I think that’s really important. If you look at Nazi Germany, the evolution of Nazi Germany. Right. And again, I’m not a Holocaust scholar, so I want to be very careful how I tread here. But if you look at the evolution of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, if you go back, yes, there was anti-Semitism in Germany in 1919-20 and so forth, There were anti-Semitic movements, all that, all that kind of stuff. But Jews also had a level of integration into German society. And in some places you could think of them, you know, they were just another religion, another cultural group, something like that. And it took a huge effort for Germany to sort of otherize Jews. Right. And those and others in Europe, they had to tap all these anti-Semitic tools, that sort of war latent inside or were being used by a small, small minority and turn them into the sort of central pieces of the central ideology of their state, of their nation and so forth. And so, you know, when we look at when we look at these kinds of marginalization, right, they’re fluid, they’re often intentional. And so and democracies can produce them right there was no reason for the United States while this happens under under British colonization. But there is no reason for the United States. Actually, I’ll say this after slavery, right. Was the United States had control. There was a period of about a dozen years where the U.S. saw one of the highest points of integration of of African Americans in 1865, 1877 period, where African-Americans were were political leaders being elected to the national office and local office and so forth. There was this moment where things opened up and there was a real possibility of of anti-racist transformation in the United States that was cut off by a white backlash, you know, that led to extreme forms, essentially an apartheid society with Jim Crow and other features that, again got challenged and civil rights here in the United States and forth. So these marginalized Asians, when the majority that that is able to do this electorally or in terms of raw power does develop the idea does think it serves its interest, does simply act out of some kind of ideology, then a democracy is fully capable of genocide and the historical record is full of this. And democracy in itself is not a foil to genocide. Again, we see this and in fact in some cases, Denmark, a democratic state, can be more effective in committing genocide. If you look at US Native American genocides, one of the features that’s very different from, say, Nazi Germany or certain other cases that are that are characterized in a similar sense. Maybe Rwanda is another example of this, where you had a very tight nation, a government that controlled the process of genocide, and everything was sort of done hierarchically. In contrast to that, the United States not it did have sort of federal level processes of genocide, but sometimes the federal government moved a bit against genocide. But there were multiple layers or levels of government or a non-governmental within the United States that participated in genocide of Native Americans for different reasons, different through different methods and so forth, and actually argued in one one piece that one of the features of the United States committing genocide against Native Americans is that that genocide had a very significant privatized and individualized component. And it’s it makes sense, you know, if Nazi if German culture tended toward centralization, industrialized bureaucracy and so forth, U.S. culture tends towards very significant local autonomy and independence and so forth. And so you had a lot of people sort of committing genocide without a centralized control from the federal government and sometimes even against federal government policy. So democracy can be very dangerous because it actually it allows people to have a kind of agency or supports a kind of agency that if it’s a genocidal agency, is much more widespread and embedded in a society than you would have when you’re being forced to commit genocide in some sense by a central authority, or that that central authority is the driving force behind genocide. No, I just want to say surely there’d be many people who opposed the statement by you. And I think it may sound very shocking to people because of the obvious fact that we revere democratic governments over totalitarian ones. I mean, again, it’s put out as a truism. Have you encountered any resistance to this idea thus far? Yes. From scholars. I think the world of who after I did a presentation on this at the last International Association of Genocide Scholars Conference in Barcelona last summer and in fact, the reaction at times seemed visceral, great people. I mean, don’t get me wrong, these are great folks. They’re very thoughtful, very, very engaged. And and they have good ideas this is not a you know, this is not the kind of reaction you get just because someone’s not willing to think through. But at the same time, it is a shocking concept that if you start to think about that, that that democracy promotion, which if you talk to I mean you hear US State Department, whatever, that’s the panacea for everything. And what the US means by democracy really means installing a government. Frankly, the United States, it doesn’t really matter if it’s democratic or not, but to see, to see, to have question this simple mantra that that builds policy and violence prevention programs and so forth. Right. When people have entire careers that are built on this model, when they’re running multimillion dollar projects that they have big grants for based on this model and you call it into question, of course, there’s a there’s a really difficult process of trying to engage that. And it’s easy to dismiss the one new idea when you have at that point in web of beliefs that is so has so much installed this idea of democracy as just a sort of panacea for everything and just automatically good compared to anything else. And what I would add is I think sometimes people misunderstand. I was I’ve never said democracy is a bad thing. I don’t think it’s bad and it’s good. Best form we have. I agree with that. But democracy is under determinative when it comes to the violence committed by a society. In other words, if we simply rely on democratization to prevent genocide, we’ve lost, That’s not going to do it. There needs to be an ethical dimension, a kind of there’s a whole layer of commitments, right. So if the majority of a society is inclusive it is anti violent, Right. Is is is respects right of those even who do not necessarily have them legally within the core group and who and who doesn’t believe that the majority has power to do an act it has the right to do that and they can separate those two things then that democracy is probably going to be anti genocide. Right. But just creating the democracy is not enough. We need to do and a lot of people do this real deep education to give a certain moral character to that democracy that will make it anti-genocidal. And I have to be honest, if you look at genocides, I’m sorry, if you look at democracies around the world and again, we can debate, you know, different countries, including United States, is a true democracy. I don’t want to get into that. You know, we haven’t done a very good job of this. You know, we still see democratic governments engage in genocide. I would simply add that if you there’s a tendency to kind of look only at the 20th century and later when we’re talking about democracy, let’s not forget that the characteristic 19th century genocide was perpetrated by Western European, American, Australian, quote unquote, democracies, again, through colonization against indigenous peoples. Right. And so democracies track record is pretty horrible. If we if we actually look at the whole sort of democratic, you know, modern Democratic and these Democratic states, and it’s easy for the United States, even though we continue in the 20th century, say in the 21st century, it’s easy for the United States and say, look, we’re democracy, We’re not committing direct genocide against indigenous peoples. Well, why not? We already did it, right. It’s already done. So there’s not really a genocide to perpetrate now, but to then do all this violence and then wash your hands and then think that now the system you have is not tied to that past violence. I think it is naive to say the least. But I think, you know, much more cynical than that. Thank you, Henry. I have we have a second part here. We’d like to speak about reparations. So more specifically, you produced a report of the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group in 2015. This also marked the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide that took place in 1915. Now the genocide against the Armenians has been aptly denied by the Turkish government. The main perpetrators. What are the ramifications of denial? So if you were to had asked me that five years ago, I would say very clearly two things. One is that that denial prevented a reparative process and a reparative process in a material sense. On the one hand, but also a symbolic or emotional sense for Armenians. And we should mention Assyrians and Greeks also fully targeted in this process as well. It prevented, you know, a kind of healing process for those populations, but also the material changes needed to support for instance, the fact that the Syrians have no homeland, the fact that Armenians, the Armenian Republic, as it exists, is a residual that is tremendously weak. And poor and vulnerable because of the genocide. Easy example is you know if you did population projections I’m following Richard Hovannisian, who is a esteemed scholar of Armenian genocide studies who passed away last year who said in 1991 at a lecture that I attended as a student in, you know, gave me this idea, he said, look, if even if the genocide of 1915, 1923 happened, but the 1918 Republic of Armenia that had been established as a as a moment of reparation by the victorious allied powers had been allowed stand and just continue into a future like any other country. By 1991, the population would have been something like 18 million people. And to look at that, that changes everything. For Armenians. What it means is even with the genocide, they would have had a kind of stability in the world, an ability at self-defense and security and economic and economic power maybe powers the right word, but economic resource is to to to function in a really productive way. So cultural security in ways that that, you know, are not possible without that kind of a state and so forth. And and so the denial which was also a refusal of reparations and some would argue that a big point of that the conclusion actually, you know, I said this very early on, that denial was about stopping reparations, that that’s been always the game. And if the Turkish government thought they could deny the acknowledge Armenian genocide without any ramifications, would have done it years ago. So that that that’s what I would have said, you know, back a decade ago, you know, back at that time of the report. And so what I did say things have changed dramatically. The implications of the failure, first of all, for reparations for Armenians and the insecurity and the economic, political, military vulnerability that is a result of genocide, which is true. I mean, pick your indigenous indigenous group. We see it all the time that that has been devastating. Sitting as Azerbaijan and Turkey have reignited or restarted the genocidal process that was begun actually in 18, you could argue 1894-96, but certainly in 1915, which both have said is about eliminating Armenians from the Caucasus region entirely, which means eliminating the Republic of Armenia with its 3 million people, eliminating any basis for Armenian peoplehood in the future in a kind of stable, permanent way. And they are explicit about that. And we saw the first part of that in the elimination by Azerbaijan in Turkey over the September 2020 through October 2023 period of the more than 2000 year presence of Armenians from the art software Nagorno-Karabakh region of the caucuses. And this is a whole item. We don’t have time to get into the details of this. This is a long term project by Azerbaijan. Even under the Soviet Union, there was a whole process during the Soviet period of the development of Armenians pushing Armenians out of this region. Resettlement of Azeri is to change the demographics, cultural, you know, pressure. I mean, there’s all sorts of things, but it really culminates in violence in the early 1990s. Armenians defend themselves, but then ultimately, as finished as Azerbaijan’s with oil money and Turkey through the waning power of Russia, are able to assert themselves in a very effective way against against this small army and population of 140,000 people and against the full Armenian population of 3 million. Remember, this is 90 million people, including one of the world’s top 20 economies, against a small, landlocked 3 million person state whose main previous benefactor, Russia, had basically pulled back its support it was left completely, completely alone. United States did nothing to help the European Union did almost nothing to help. And so that’s if we think about the implications of genocide long term, this is what it is. Genocides that weaken a group often culminate with the 50 years later, 100 years later, 200 years later, ultimate extinction of that group. Because these processes continue. Sometimes they don’t have to be active, sometimes they are. And so my argument now is reparations. The failure to have reparations is what is leading to the ultimate destruction of Armenians today. So that’s what I would say, yes. Isn’t it possible to have reparations happening at the same time as a genocide being committed by perpetrators? You know what I mean? I would say, well, if we think about reparations and what we need to talk about real reparations, right. So reparations are there’s a material component. It can be land return, compensation for lost labor, destructive, you know, deaths, the demographic destruction and so forth. But it has other components as well. Criminal justice, I would consider also part of that that’s not as relevant as relevant to 1950. And it’s become relevant, unfortunately, because of the recent violence and the atrocities committed by Azerbaijan and Turkey against Armenians. You know, so that’s relevant, but not for the past. But there are other you know, there are other obvious things, you know, symbolic reparations which are about things like apology, broad education globally, those those kinds of things. And I would add and that’s very important. But another piece of this that’s crucial is perpetrator rehabilitation. So when a society commits genocide and again, I’m saying this is somebody in the US who sees this embedded in my society, but it’s certainly embedded deeply. The people committed the 1915 genocide against Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians didn’t leave Turkey. Some of them fled, some of them were killed, you know, But but the bulk of them were the people who formed the Turkish Republic. And they formed it, for instance, through generating an economy using the expropriated wealth of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks. I mean, Turkish intellectuals will talk about this, right? That’s that’s where the economy comes from. And when they built their institutions, they built them around this genocidal project that they had successfully completed. Right. It’s not a I mean, it’s obvious why Turkey has treated the Kurds. Right. In a in a mass violent I would say at times pro genocidal way, although it’s a little bit different over the 20th century and into the 21st century. Right. That mechanism of genocide was already there. It was looking for its next victim. Right. And so politically, intellectually, in terms of academia, militarily, economically, genocidal mentality as as well as practices cultural elements and so forth, get embedded in a society. And unless a rehabilitative process happens where that society actually extirpate those tendencies and really, you know, we talk about de-Nazification after after World War Two and the Holocaust, right. And that was even very incomplete and handled and very politicized, if I can say it, that way, given the US attitudes about about some Nazis who were useful to us. So we didn’t worry too much about about them, but but at least some kind of process like that right? The genocidal intent is still there. The genocidal mechanisms are still there, the attitudes are still there. And I think we’ve seen in the last three years Turkey was ready to jump into genocide against at the drop of a hat when the opportunity was there. And so I think that’s really important. The other thing that’s really crucial, and this is one of my additions to the report, is the responsibility for the security in perpetuity for the genocide victim group, the perpetrator group that takes on that responsibility. Because what they did permanently weakened the victim. And so, for instance, the United States government doesn’t just have a responsibility to tolerate Native American groups to give them a little space. We have an absolute responsibility to ensure the vibrant, well-resourced, culturally respected aid, not just survival, but thriving of every indigenous community in the United States. We have that responsibility. We need to protect them from the dangers that are happening. We need to protect them from violence and so forth. And no genocide perpetrator does that. I mean, you know, I mean, you can look even at Germany, there’s really a residual Jewish community in Germany anyway, right? So they’re not really doing that. But but most others continue actively undermining the long term viability of of victim groups. And that security I mean, you think about the difference if Turkey actually had had a responsibility for the state security of Armenia because of the genocide, nothing that’s happened to Armenians, this new renewed genocide could have happened. Right. So it’s another feature. So I think there’s a lot there to really look at when we talk about reparations. I don’t know if this question is relevant, but we’re speaking about Turkey. We’re using this word and it’s a collective noun. And the question to you is within the Ottoman well, well within Turkey right now, since we’re talking about the genocide that just recently happened, which factions deny the Armenian genocide, for instance, and which factions are the perpetrators? Yeah, I’m going to do something I shouldn’t do. As a scholar, would you say this is a little bit outside my area of expertise so I’m not a Turkologist, so I don’t know the intimate or internal details of Turkish society. Well, I know I read what people are producing, so I have some sense of this and I’ve worked with people in Turkey and so forth. But Turkey and Azerbaijan, it’s very important to point out Azerbaijan is also like this. The United States, any society, right, has a whole complex of internal political forces, attitudes and so forth. And in every society, right, let’s not forget that 300,000 Germans who were considered opponents of of the Nazi regime. Right. Who were who were imprisoned and so forth. Right. People were against the Holocaust. Germans are against the Holocaust. There are a lot of people like that. Right. In Turkey, people fought against the genocide. You know, for instance, leading clerics were against it, especially the push to declare jihad against Christians in the Ottoman Empire. And in fact, many of them had lost their positions and were replaced by more pliant clerics. You know, local governors in some cases refused to implement genocide orders and lost their positions. Many people risked their lives. And this is true in any, you know, any society. And I’ve even, you know, in the recent stuff, recent violence with Azerbaijan, you still can read statements by Azeris, right, who say, wow, I really feel bad about I don’t want you to be we don’t want to be killing Armenians, things like that. Right? There are good people in every society. It’s probably the same mix in every society, same percentage of people who would not commit genocide, who are against it. And I admire them. I haven’t been in a position maybe where I’ve had to make that stark choice, but hope I would make the right choice. But, you know, so societies are very complicated and Turkey has had a very strong movement toward recognition of the Armenian genocide and even reparations. And one of the first people, Ragıp Zarakolu, who was an incredible activist in Turkey, brilliant guy, was a close friend of Hrant Dink, who was the Armenian who was assassinated in 2007 for talking about the Armenian genocide, even though he tended to avoid the word and all sorts of things. He back on, you know, more than 15 years ago started talking about substantive reparations for Armenians. Even when I was talking about it, but I was a little hesitant, who’s going to take this seriously, that kind of thing. And as a Turk, as a Turk who had spent a lot of time in jail because of his opposition to the Turkish government in different ways, including on the Armenian issue, Kurdish issues and so forth, he was saying, right. So people people are willing to really embrace in every society and the things will vary. You know, you can look at Japan and its legacy, you know, the comfort women and the Nanjing Massacre and so forth out of the World War two era. And Japan’s like a 50% society like has a society really wants to acknowledge and recognize and repair and so forth. And then half the society is in denial and so on. This is true of most societies. And one of you talk about democratization. So one of the ideas, if you really want to democratize Turkey, you really and ultimately democratize Azerbaijan, which I think is necessary for the survival of Armenia. It needs to be one that embraces these folks. Right. As you know, with the Erdogan crackdown over the past few years, a lot of these intellectuals, for instance, who are speaking up on behalf of Kurds, Armenians and others were jailed. Right. So they were marginalized. Their voices had not only were not allowed to participate in the democracy or the governmental debates and the public debates and so forth, but they were completely marginalized, pushed out of any possibility of engaging. And this is very typical of authoritarian regimes. There’s the democracy movement in Azerbaijan. And we need that. We need to recognize their struggles, which are often dangerous and require sacrifice. And I think if I have a hope going forward in different kinds of genocidal regimes, including the United States, is that that those groups over a long period of time can educate people and build a critical mass to really change the character of their either democracies or to create a democracy out of totalitarian or authoritarian structures that will be a real democracy, legitimate, inclusive, anti genocidal democracy. And so I have a big question because it encompasses many different components. But here is the question. So the study group was set up in 2015. That’s 12 years ago. I think you did touch on some of the main ideas which were which were proposed reparations. But I’m curious to know more because I did read the report and I saw that you it was a division into various categories and all that. And I do want to in more detail what’s happened since then and also just a little bit about the genesis of all of these ideas about reparations. Where did they come from? What is basically something you draw from precedent and what is what is what you were thinking about in the in the report? Yeah. So that group actually started in 2007. We did a lot of work and we actually had a draft report we were circulating. There was a conference at UCLA Law School that was organized around our report in 2010. We did some work and then we ultimately decided we wanted to release it in 2015 to kind of create a what what I’ll say, an historically appropriate impact, because this was a point where this issue was on people’s mind and don’t forget, this was also a period when I say 2014, 2015 was the end of this, but there was a period in the 2000’s sort of following the assassination of Hrant Dink in 2007 up until maybe 2013, somewhere in there where Turkey itself was undergoing a lot of what appeared to be very positive possibilities. There was a growing democracy movement. There was a growing recognition of the Armenian genocide. I spoke in Turkey in both 2010 and 2015, and I have to say, even though state security was there, even though it was scary, bomb threats, all that kind of stuff, I was able to talk about and and I think was the first person probably since the genocide to, you know, in Turkey to lay out an explicit claim for territorial reparations. And, you know, I was allowed to do that. I was allowed to get back on a plane and go back to the US. So there was a moment of openness. And then Erdogan just close that door completely out of his own political agenda. So we had a lot of hope. I had a lot of hope that this was the time to really start these discussions. And so part of it was reparations was the path forward for both Turkey and Armenia. In my view, Turkey engage in the Armenian genocide and Greek and Assyrians as well in a meaningful way is the way forward for Turkey. If Turks really want a good if they want a society they can be proud of, not a weak nationalism, ultra nationalism that’s based on violence and is so frail and open to so much criticism, but a really strong sense of ethnically based nationalism. If they want a place in the world that’s unquestioned. Right. They could actually now have said, I had said this at the time, they could take the lead because no one else is doing the United States is not doing, you know, do anything meaningful. Australia, 1997 does a great report. And then within three years they’re sort of backing off from it right on the Bring them home report. Societies aren’t doing this. Turkey actually could have gone from someone a country widely criticized as authoritarian, as genocidal, all these kinds of things to a world leader in this in this anti genocidal pro-democracy movement. They could have established themselves obviously they didn’t take that route, but there was a potential for that. And so for Turkey, this is essential as well, right? I mean, they can still have power and they can maybe have more they can still go forward as a turkey, you know, for another 100 years or however long their society lasts before it implodes because of the internal problems. But it to be a really good society, they need the reparations as much as Armenia. And I’ve got an article I written about this a few years ago, an article on impossible harms the point at which reparations becomes impossible. And I use the comparable an example for Japan that Japan by all its denial and waiting from the 1990s into the into the 20 tens, was actually destroying the one opportunity it had to prevent a permanent taint on its history. Because the comfort women, the former comfort women were all elderly by then. There are still a very few alive. And I’m going to I’ve got a drafted article I want to send out some more journalistic publication. I just have to have to get it out. This is the last chance to do something for some surviving women. And if you miss that opportunity forever, your society can never do anything to address the horrible harm that it did in the past. And for me, that’s an important I called it impossible harm. It’s not the best label, but there are many. There are different things like this. And so for a turkey, you know, it’s got a window. If Armenia is destroyed, that’s it. That may be its goal right now, but that’s it. Turkey is forever a genocide perpetrator. We can think of North and South American countries, including the United States. There are many extinct indigenous groups, Right. Who are destroyed through genocide and other processes that have state no state driven. Nothing can ever be done right. The United States is forever a genocidal regime, right? We can we can maybe do something to make that better than worse. But it’s there and and it’s really so reparative justice is really important in this way and sort of for the future. And that’s where this whole genesis of this came out. This is a historical moment where we needed to really think about that. And I can get into my personal thinking about this. But but it’s probably not as interesting than the historical issues. And then in terms of the reparations, the thinking about reparations, I have to be honest, a little bit of it was spawned by my experience as a graduate student of 1992 in the United States and the attempts by indigenous groups and others to try to finally get the historical record out there of the destruction that started in 1492 by Christopher Columbus invading the Americas and unleashing them. He was a major genocide perpetrator in against the Taino and others. And what followed was, was horrific, as we know. And so thinking about that moment and then the backlash in the United States, which was devastating, made me understand how challenging this issue of repair, of historical repair is. And Native American groups in the United States ask for very little, to be perfectly honest, and are often denied that. Right. And so there’s so much resistance to reparations. And so to try to think about, okay, if we’ve got a historical moment where something possibly could happen, but also if we give in to that pressure against talking about reparations. Right. Because it’s so hard because there’s such a backlash, we remove the one lever that victim group survivor groups have, which is the moral authority to continue to claim that they were wrong and that they’re owed something. And I have debates among Armenians with this all the time. Many Armenians are against reparations for the Armenian genocide because they think they just want recognition and go on to the future and all this kind of stuff. The I mean, government’s position is that it is explicitly that and has been for a bit. And and for me, you know, even if you’re cynical and you’re looking at as a bargaining tool giving up, you’re most important lever doesn’t make sense. But more importantly, if you want a future as a state, you have to hold on to the possibility of reparations to get your two to as a part of the recovery that you really need to be viable long term. You know, as a philosopher, a refugee from philosophy at times, but a philosopher, you know, I certainly am attuned to arguments and arguments that often are ideologically tainted, which you see a lot of in a lot of the sort of public debates about these kinds of issues racism, reparations, all sorts of things like that. And as I looked at the way reparations was typically talked about and looked a lot about, you know, Native American, African-American, Armenian, other other context, and look at the arguments that were used against reparations. I started realizing how bad those arguments actually were and how much they assumed in problematic ways. You know, so, for instance, there’s the you know, the argument against time passed long past genocide shouldn’t be repaired because. Well, they’re long past time heals all wounds. In fact, if you look at the way that genocide trajectories unfold post active genocide, it’s typically gets worse and worse for the victim groups over time. I’ve talked about the Armenian case, but indigenous groups become more and more vulnerable over time. Their identity becomes less and less cohesive. They, you know, we’re seeing a massive loss of small language group languages in the current era. And part of that is because of and so just the whole idea of time, actually what I argue is time makes things worse. The passage of time makes the debt, the reparative debt even greater than it was, because with each year, more damage sort of accrues against the victim boots. And let’s not forget, the perpetrator groups are investing all that they gain economically, their political security, their identity, cohesion, that often is is sort of produced or enhanced through genocide to process all that, because they’re not on the spot at all. They have this very comfortable existence post-genocide becomes increased. Right. And so the perpetrator victim sort of divide becomes greater. But also the real objective situation of victims becomes worse. And so that’s one example, this idea that time, you know, the passage of time tends to mitigate against the obligation of of reparations. I would oppose. And again, that’s one of my oppositional things, I guess. But but it’s it’s worth articulating. So I think I have one last question, you know, because we’re running out of time. But my question about do we need since I mean, in view of what you have said about the report issued in 2015, do you think we need a second one to maybe revise whatever is already over a second one, which is maybe an amended one? I’ve actually thought. Proposals just because it would, with proposals just because you may of course, with time, we always get more clarity and we start to see how things could have been probably a bit different than what we thought of them back then. So that’s why I’m just I’m, I’m referring to that. Not in any way to. Good question. No, this is this is great. Let me just let me thank you for that comment, which is more of a comment and a question. And I had just thought a little bit about what new damages have been done in the last four years that need to be need to be addressed. So it’s added to the sort of obligation. But I hadn’t thought about that kind of a project, you know, that you’re suggesting, which is really rethinking this whole sort of thing, both in terms of what what we’ve learned over the past ten years, but also in terms of the changing situation for Armenians, Turkey, Azerbaijan and others. So that’s a great idea. So you’ve given me homework, which I guess at the end of a podcast isn’t a bad thing, and I appreciate that. So I’m going to think about that quite a bit. Well, it was lovely speaking with you, Henry. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much, Sabah. And also to Luis who’s been in the background making this happen. I really appreciate the chance to to share some ideas and the great questions. And hopefully down the road after that second reparations report comes out, we’ll be able to talk again. This was Not to Forgive, but to Understand with our guest, Henry Theriault. To our listeners, don’t forget to, like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. But just creating the democracy is not enough. We need to do and a lot of people do this real deep education to give a certain moral character to that democracy that will make it anti-genocidal. And I have to be honest, if you look at genocides, I’m sorry, if you look at democracies around the world and again, we can debate, you know, different countries, including United States, is a true democracy. I don’t want to get into that. You know, we haven’t done a very good job of this. This is Not to Forgive, but to Understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Henry Theriault is the associate vice president for academic affairs at Worcester State University. With a distinguished career in philosophy and genocide studies, Theriault has chaired WSU’s philosophy department and coordinated its Human Rights Center. He has authored Pivotal Works on Denial, Reparations, and Mass Violence against women and girls, and served as president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.