Writing about a colleague’s book is a considerable investment of time and energy for busy academics, so I am grateful to Beatrice de Graaf, Ulrike von Hirschhausen, and Michael Wildt for their learned commentaries, as well as to the journal’s editors, particularly Robert Gerwarth, for initiating the forum. Before responding to the commentaries, I briefly explain why I wrote the book, summarize its arguments, and explain its scholarly contexts. The book is called The Problems of Genocide because the concept ‘is a problem in two ways: not only the terrible fact of mass death, but also how the relatively new idea and law of genocide organizes and distorts our thinking about civilian (that is, noncombatant) destruction’ (1). This distortion inheres in the de facto hierarchy of international criminal law atop which sits genocide as the ‘crime of crimes’, meaning that crimes against humanity and war crimes do not ‘shock the conscience of mankind’, to use the term of art to refer to the upper threshold of humanitarian emergency. The distortion consists in a misleading distinction, which forms the basis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, between political and non-political civilian destruction: the former is driven by rational and pragmatic goals like military victory, the latter by irrational hatred of another’s identity, killing them solely because of who they are, not for anything they (or members of their group) have done. For reasons I mention below, the latter form of mass destruction was modelled on the Holocaust, which became the archetype of genocide. Henceforth, actors seeking genocide recognition felt compelled to frame their case according to the Holocaust archetype by depicting victims as

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回应 JMEH 论坛关于种族灭绝问题的评论

对于忙碌的学者来说，写一篇同事的书是一项相当大的时间和精力投入，因此我感谢 Beatrice de Graaf、Ulrike von Hirschhausen 和 Michael Wildt 的博学评论，以及期刊的编辑，特别是 Robert Gerwarth，用于发起论坛。在回应评论之前，我简要解释了我写这本书的原因，总结了它的论点，并解释了它的学术背景。这本书被称为种族灭绝的问题，因为这个概念在两个方面都是一个问题：不仅是大规模死亡的可怕事实，而且是相对较新的种族灭绝观念和法律如何组织和扭曲我们对平民的思考（即，非战斗）破坏”（1）。这种扭曲源于国际刑法事实上的等级制度，将种族灭绝视为“罪行”，这意味着危害人类罪和战争罪不会“震惊人类的良心”，用艺术术语来指代达到人道主义紧急状态的上限。这种扭曲在于一种误导性的区分，它构成了大屠杀和种族灭绝研究的基础，对政治和非政治平民的破坏：前者是由理性和务实的目标驱动的，如军事胜利，后者是由对他人身份的非理性仇恨、杀戮驱动的。他们仅仅因为他们是谁，而不是因为他们（或他们的团队成员）所做的任何事情。由于我在下面提到的原因，后一种形式的大规模毁灭是以大屠杀为蓝本的，大屠杀成为种族灭绝的原型。今后，