The function of these words—as well as the word genocide, to whose propagation the book is partly devoted—is to place the evil people beyond the pale of politics, of negotiation, of human intercourse. Would you shake hands with a mass murderer? With the invocation of the word genocide, we move into some other sphere of human relations. Thought, strategy, negotiation shut down; there is only right and wrong, only fight or flight. Which is precisely, in fact, the point.
A politics this morally coercive may explain why a president who is a former law professor, and who came to power with the mandate to restore the rule of law, would so brazenly ignore the Constitution. But a politics this morally coercive is not a politics at all.
What has happened to human rights in the last 20 years is a hijacking, of the sort Napoleon managed with the Declaration of the Rights of Man when he turned Europe into a bloodbath, as Power would put it, under its banner. The search around the globe for genocides to eradicate is the ultimate rights perversion, for it reduces human rights to the right not to be brutally murdered in a particular way that fits the definition of genocide given in the Genocide Convention. This cannot be anyone's idea of a robust human rights. If human rights are to be reclaimed they need first of all to be restored to the realm of politics. Not the realm of morality, which is always and ever a discussion of good versus evil, but politics, a discussion and argument over competing legitimate aims—e.g., the aim of honoring sovereignty and not waging war, versus the aim of protecting the defenseless and ensuring their rights.
Of all the places to make a stand on the importance of flexibility in the scope and weight of human rights, genocide is an odd choice. Isn't the fact everyone thinks genocide is bad a good thing? Further, it's well-understood in the literature that the wrongness of genocide does not translate in any straightforward way to political facts: who should intervene, when intervention is appropriate, etc.* I was talking with a colleague about recent developments in Somalia and argued against intervention in those circumstances even though intentional forced famine is #2 on the list of rights violations everyone can agree are bad and might merit forcible response.
*To be clear: well understood in the literature, not well understood by political decision-makers. This fact is sometimes lost on those in the literature. My favorite expression of this is a sentiment expressed at least twice with slight variations in Theodor Meron's The Humanization of International Law (a great book, present criticism notwithstanding): "In this area, political reality regretfully lags behind legal principle." Those silly politicians, if only they knew the answer's already been figured out!
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