Aeon: Who counts as a victim?

Jackson’s approach proved to be fatally prophetic. Ever since, governments of most stripes countenance inflicting enemy civilian casualties rather than endangering their military forces. Bombing enemies into submission – conceived as entire societies – has been the preferred means, from the US flattening of North Korea in the early 1950s, and later in Vietnam, and the Russian shelling of Grozny, Chechnya, in the 1990s, to the serial Israeli attacks on Gaza, the Syrian government’s barrel-bombing of Aleppo and other localities, and the Saudi-led destruction of Yemen. While more accurate than shelling and saturation bombing, continuous US drone strikes also causes civilian deaths. Together, these actions have killed millions. Trumping them all is the largest post-Second World War civilian casualty case: the some 45 million ordinary Chinese who perished in the Great Leap Forward famine between 1958 and 1962. But who remembers these people and their suffering besides their families and some academics? They’re excluded from the contemporary image of authentic victimhood because they aren’t victims of genocide.[...]

Second, Allied bombing killed almost a million German and Japanese civilians: again, enemy civilians couldn’t be iconic victims. Although Germans and Japanese militaries had started the practice of bombing undefended cities, the Allies perfected it. This is why, at Nuremberg, Germans weren’t indicted for their aerial bombing campaigns. [...]

The image of the largely agentless and innocent Jewish victim represents the ‘ideal’ victim: that socially constructed status by which sympathy and legitimacy are conferred on certain objects of violence and not on others. Because of the Holocaust memory’s omnipresence, its Jewish victims represent the archetypal and universal form of this status. This status becomes what the writer Alex Cocotas in 2017 called a ‘sacred altar’ that ‘foster[s] identification with victimhood’, even though – or perhaps because – most people are likely to be perpetrators rather than victims because they aren’t members of minorities.

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