The crime of genocide is surrounded by tragic ironies and contradictions. One involves the political and moral problem of the nation-state itself. For not only does the nation-state privilege, and claim to protect, one nation by warring against and destroying others, to paraphrase Balzac’s quip about there being a great crime behind every great fortune, there is a genocide behind every nation-state. And yet it is this institution, with this conflict of interests, that is supposed to prevent genocides.

Another, more recent irony, is that while the crime of genocide attacks (in the words of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term and drafted the Convention) both the body and the spirit of a people from annihilation (the Genocide Convention seeks to protect both the physical bodies of people and the language and culture of a people), the very word genocide, which is a piece of language, and an aspect of a culture of victims of genocide, is being vanished by algorithmic censors — in service of a culture of domination currently shamelessly perpetrating genocide against the Palestinian people, amounting to a type of genocide of genocide. Just one of the reasons why you may not see this.

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