“We’re hardwired for love. We are taught to do violence, and to hate.” — Dana Mashoian Walrath

A couple of months ago in Warsaw, the Polish writer and Jewish activist Konstanty Gebert argued that Gaza wasn’t a genocide. Today’s guest disagrees. In The Book of Genocides, graphic artist and anthropologist Dana Mashoian Walrath draws ten genocides including what she sees as the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli army in Gaza.

So what, exactly, is a “genocide”? Walrath’s definition borrows from the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term during the Second World War. Lemkin meant the word to mean the destruction of peoples that had been deemed sub-human. Thus Walrath includes crimes against the First Peoples of the Americas and Black Americans alongside 20th-century mass killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia, where her ancestors were persecuted.

Some will quibble over this list. Although quibbling over the top (or bottom) ten genocides isn’t exactly good taste. Besides, The Book of Genocides is a poignant work of graphic art in the tradition of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And its author, for all her anthropological insights into why people commit crimes against humanity, isn’t shy with her genocide jokes. Springtime for Hitler, anyone?

Five Takeaways

•       Always a Land Grab. Ten genocides across five centuries — the First Peoples of the Americas, Black Americans, Aboriginal Australians, Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, the Rohingya, and Gaza — chosen not to rank horrors but to expose “the repetitive patterns and the processes that underlie genocide.” Walrath’s definition is Raphael Lemkin’s original, processual one, before politics narrowed the convention: the purpose is always a land grab, the apparatus always dehumanization, and precise academic definitions are often deployed “to keep some stories and histories out.” The book began as an interactive art installation with nine genocides and a tenth chapter on “the borders of genocide” — Afghanistan, Vietnam, Congo, Ukraine, Palestine — until the violence in Gaza persuaded her to make the case outright, while insisting the aim is not to demonize her Jewish friends, Judaism, or Israel, but to show the system. Her hope: that a globally framed comic might open dialogue between Jews and Palestinians “trapped in enmity right now.”

•       Lemkin’s Last Train. The man who coined the word is the book’s tragic through-line. As a Polish law student, Lemkin followed the Berlin trial of a young Armenian who had shot one of the architects of the Armenian genocide — and found it ludicrous that the assassin faced justice for one murder while his victim had answered for none of his millions. His family farm had been seized in the First World War; his brother Samuel died in the forest. He escaped Warsaw on a train that was bombed, ran by night to reach his family, and failed to persuade them to leave (“they do this to us all the time”). Via Sweden, Russia, Japan, and Duke, he spent the war in Washington trying to make Americans see. His convention passed — then waited years for the US, UK, and China to ratify — and he died in 1959 penniless and friendless, UN officials fleeing him in the corridors. Walrath’s speculation: his great regret, looking down, may be refusing to support We Charge Genocide, the 1951 petition by Black Americans — “we can’t talk about something America has done” in the Cold War. Had America owned and repaired that crime then, “we’d be in a very different world.”

•       Can You Have Half a Genocide? Andrew’s pushback — if politicians can be “verging on genocidal,” does every Karen yelling at her kids get accused of it? — drew the hour’s most honest concession: “that’s the absolute spot-on critique of the approach I’ve taken.” Her defense is preventive: half a genocide is “too quantitative”; better to name things “on their way to massacre” and stop them, or repair them, than to litigate the label afterward. Genocide, she argues, predates modernity and Arendt’s industrial reading — it arrives with the first hierarchical, extracting, wealth-inheriting “so-called civilizations,” Sparta and Thucydides included. Slavery qualifies because the operational word is systemic: the transatlantic trade ran on thinking of humans as lesser. But she draws one line firmly: asked about factory farms as future genocides, “I would hate to see genocide get used over there. It is something that humans do to one another” — and, she insists, don’t have to: the literature on aversion to killing shows soldiers must be socialized into it. We’re hardwired for love and taught to hate.

•       Stanton’s Stages in MAGA America. Is there something genocidal in MAGA’s language about undocumented immigrants? “Absolutely.” Walrath applies the ten stages of genocide — the classroom heuristic Gregory Stanton first presented to the State Department in 1996 — and finds the United States “doing a heck of a lot of them”: polarization; dehumanization (people called vermin, “not worthy of life”); discrimination in the restriction of voting rights. “We’re on very, very shaky ground.” Homelessness, in the same frame, is the product of structures that disenfranchise some and privilege others — “we’ve got enough to go around; we just revere wealth.” Her model for how ordinary people let it happen is Ursula Hegi’s Stones from the River: the fearful, the wounded, the disenfranchised, vulnerable to takeover — with parallels in MAGA voters spurned by the neoliberal machine and unable to see who is pulling the levers. Hence her claim for the book: it is resistance, but resistance that builds a coalition across horrors rather than policing which horror counts.

•       Springtime for Hitler. She didn’t read Maus until 2009 — “that’s when I found my medium and just went wild” — and pays it explicit homage in the book. Comics, she argues, let readers “come into” a history and think for themselves, and laughter is respite: an angry messenger gets no listeners. Her earlier Aliceheimer’s let people laugh about her mother’s dementia (not at it, she corrected sharply); telling audiences she’s working on her genocide jokes makes them relax enough to hear the rest. Andrew’s challenge — “do you really want to make it safe?” — produced the useful distinction: safe to enter, not whitewashed; hand-lettered so readers can bring the content in, every truth intact. The closing exchange landed on The Producers and Springtime for Hitler as a brilliant portrayal of the legacies of catastrophe. Her last word: knowledge must cross boundaries, “and the boundaries are all human made, so let’s unmake them.” Andrew’s: most will disagree with her list — and it may be a classic.

About the Guest

Dana Mashoian Walrath is a writer, artist, and anthropologist. Her award-winning works include Aliceheimer’s, a graphic memoir about her mother’s dementia, and Like Water on Stone, a verse novel about the Armenian genocide. She holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania; her comics, art, essays, and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The Lancet, Slate, and on NPR. The Book of Genocide...