A Rhetorical Crime
ISBN: 9780813594699
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Rutgers University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Cold War.; Genocide intervention; Genocide (International law);

The Genocide Convention was drafted by the United Nations in the late 1940s, as a response to the horrors of the Second World War. But was the Genocide Convention truly effective at achieving its humanitarian aims, or did it merely exacerbate the divisive rhetoric of Cold War geopolitics?

A Rhetorical Crime shows how genocide morphed from a legal concept into a political discourse used in propaganda battles between the United States and the Soviet Union. Over the course of the Cold War era, nearly eighty countries were accused of genocide, and yet there were few real-time interventions to stop the atrocities committed by genocidal regimes like the Cambodian Khmer Rouge.

Renowned genocide scholar Anton Weiss-Wendt employs a unique comparative approach, analyzing the statements of Soviet and American politicians, historians, and legal scholars in order to deduce why their moral posturing far exceeded their humanitarian action.

ANTON WEISS-WENDT is a research professor at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway. He is the author of many books, including The Soviet Union and the Genocide Convention, 1945-1954 .

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