10 - Lemkin, Arendt, Vietnam, and Liberal Permanent Security

Summary

The instalment of genocide as the “crime of crimes” marked a turning point in the centuries-old language of transgression: now only mass criminality motivated by race-hatred that resembled its archetype, the Holocaust, shocked the “conscience of mankind.” This depoliticization had momentous consequences for the visibility of permanent security. Now only illiberal permanent security – embodied by the Axis powers that disgraced themselves in the Second World War – counted as seriously criminal. Practices of liberal permanent security were not so shocking, notwithstanding the postwar peace movement’s attempt to link Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The most dramatic decades are mid-1960s to the early 1980s when scholars and activists who excoriated the US bombing and counterinsurgency strategy in Vietnam, and its nuclear weapons program. At issue were the notions of “national security” and “military necessity,” the watchwords of the juggernaut they called the US “national security state.”