Hoffmann: The Stigma of Genocide and the Denial of Communist Crimes

Tamás Hoffmann (Corvinus Univ. of Budapest) has posted The Stigma of Genocide and the Denial of Communist Crimes (in The Crime of Genocide Now and Then: Evolution of a Crime, Pavel Šturma & Milan Lipovský eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Genocide is generally understood as the “crime of crimes”, the most serious international offence that "shocks the conscience of mankind". Even though its narrow legal construction only allows for the categorizing very specific atrocities as genocide, the perceived gravity creates a special stigma that paradoxically might be seen to reduce the seriousness of other crimes in comparison. This has led to various attempts to bridge the schism between genocide and other international crimes in legal and social science scholarship and in domestic law. Some post-communist countries introduced equal legal sanctions for the denial of the Holocaust - the par excellence genocide - and communist crimes, which on many occasions do not even reach the level of international crimes. My chapter focuses on this phenomenon and aims to demonstrate that the desire to symbolically express the seriousness of communist crimes by putting them on an equal footing with the Holocaust threatens to simultaneously inflate the gravity of communist crimes and decrease the perceived seriousness of the Holocaust.