1, 2, 3 genocides

Since Israel began strangling Gaza’s economy at the end of the first intifada in 1993, UNRWA has been de facto responsible for the survival of the two million Palestinian hostages held in this open-air prison. (UNRWA stands for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and the term ‘open-air prison’ was coined by Human Rights Watch in 2007). In Gaza alone, UNRWA used to employ some 13,000 people. Israel has accused twelve (12) of them of involvement in the 7 October 2023 Palestinian uprising. Reason enough for eleven Western states to declare the day after this accusation – which coincidentally came out exactly the day after the International Court of Justice accepted South Africa’s complaint of genocide by Israel – that they would stop funding the agency. One of these eleven states is Germany. This means nothing less than Germany’s active participation in the genocide being perpetrated by the ‘Jewish state’ against the Palestinian people.  (Genocide refers to the complex and deliberate process of exterminating a people. It involves the physical liquidation of human beings, the destruction of all infrastructure to render the territory uninhabitable, and the deliberate destruction of the culture, language, history, knowledge, memory … of the people concerned. For the legal definition, see Article II of the Genocide Convention.)

Now, Germany’s unconditional support for Israel (also in domestic politics, through the repression of any criticism of Zionism or solidarity with Palestina) is often legitimised by the idea of Wiedergutmachung. Germany must make amends for the most famous genocide of the twentieth century, that perpetrated by its predecessor, the Third Reich, and its European cronies against the Jewish population between 1933 and 1945. Two genocides in the space of eighty years? It made the Belgian Minister for Development Cooperation, Caroline Gennez, sigh: ‘German friends, do you really want to be on the wrong side of history twice?

A bit of a silly question, of course, though understandable at a time when the mass murder in Gaza is being broadcast live across the globe. But wait, don’t you remember one of the many, many colourful threads in the rainbow of gravity?  Thomas Pynchon introduces the Schwarzkommando quite at the beginning of his sweeping, all-encompassing tale of the end of the war, in the period from December 1944 to September 1945.

Pirate Prentice of the S.O.E. came back with the first hard intelligence that there were indeed in Germany real Africans, Hereros, ex-colonials from South-West Africa, somehow active in the secret-weapons program. Myron Grunton, inspired, produced on the air one night completely ad lib the passage that found its way into the first Black Wing directive: “Germany once treated its Africans like a stern but loving stepfather, chastising them when necessary, often with death. Remember? But that was far away in Südwest, and since then a generation has gone by. Now the Herero lives in his stepfather’s house. Perhaps you, listening, have seen him. Now he stays up past the curfews, and watches his stepfather while he sleeps, invisible, protected by the night which is his own colour. What are they all thinking? Where are the Hereros tonight? What are they doing, this instant, your dark, secret children?”

‘Chastising them when necessary, often with death’. That’s what it’s all about (I’m partly using Danylo Hawaleshka’s text for the graphic story ‘Israel, Gaza, Germany and the genocide in Namibia’): In 1884, thirteen European countries and the United States met at the Berlin Conference to decide the rules for carving up and colonising Africa. With this agreement in place, Germany took over Namibia and by the early 1900s some five thousand German settlers ruled over 250,000 indigenous people. The German colonists evicted the Herero people – nomadic cattle herders – from their ancestral lands and forced them to live in reservations. Locals caught breaking the law were whipped or hanged. The land grabs and brutality led to much anger, and in 1904 the Herero, led by Samuel Maharero, rose up against the colonisers, killing more than 120 people, mostly Germans, on 12 January. Despite initial military successes, the Herero, Nama and others soon fell under German machine-gun and artillery fire. Between 1904 and 1908, approximately 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama living in the territory of present-day Namibia were exterminated by the forces of the Second Reich. This crime in African colonial history is now considered the first genocide of the 20th century. On 2 October 1904, the head of the German Expeditionary Corps, General Lothar von Trotha, signed a Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) stating: ‘All Herero must leave the country. If they don’t, I will force them to leave with my big artillery guns. Any Herero found on German soil, armed or unarmed, with or without animals, will be executed. I will accept no women or children. They must leave or die. This is my decision for the Herero people.’

And that’s what happened. More than 90,000 people were killed, not only by bullets and shells, but also by hunger and thirst in the Kalahari desert, where the survivors were driven. And also by imprisonment in forced labour and extermination camps. If all this reminds you of something that happened thirty or forty years later, you’re right. And not just because the first German colonial governor of the Herreros and Nama region was named Goering, and he was the father of the future Nazi field marshal and Hitler’s deputy, Hermann Goering. Most importantly, some of the genocidaires of 1904 lived long enough to play a leading role in the Holocaust of the Jewish people forty years later. Like, for example, Franz Ritter von Epp, von Trotha’s right-hand man and eminence in the Nazi party, who drowned Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacus uprising in blood and exterminated the Jews and Roma of Bavaria while he was its supreme leader.

But doesn’t it also remind you of something that is happening today, right in front of your helpless eyes? For German officials and the mass media, Wir haben es nicht gewusst is now just a very ironic dictum. Not one, not two, but three genocides.