“We, the people, charge genocide.”
The two years that have passed since October 7, 2023 have awakened the world to the plight of Palestinians since 1948: to the fact that the indigenous people of Palestine have been living through a 77-year genocide, sanctioned by the white west, and conducted with methodological brutality and astonishing cruelty by the zionists. Now, because of Al-Aqsa flood, it is impossible to deny or doubt the fact of this genocide. It is also impossible to ignore the terrible irony that this genocide is being carried out in the name of those people, “the Jewish people of Nazi Germany,” to use Paul Robeson’s phrase, for whom the United Nations Conventions on Genocide were first enacted back in 1946.
Robeson’s essay “Genocide Stalks the U.S.A.,” published in New World Review in 1952, is worth returning to. He does not write about Palestine. Instead, the essay focuses on the efforts by William Lorenzo Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress to present the United Nations with a petition charging the United States with committing genocide against African Americans. However, Robeson offers us two things that help us understand the question of Palestine: a reminder, and a methodology.
In the first instance, Robeson reminds us of the definition of genocide according to the United Nations. He reminds us that the opening articles of the UN Convention on Genocide do not only classify the crime of genocide as the “mass extermination of a people” as so often associated with Nazi Germany. Instead, the crime of genocide can involve: “(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” It was based on these clauses that the US was charged with genocide against its Black population. These clauses also remind us that genocide has long been deployed against the Palestinians.
In the second instance, Robeson offers us a methodology for not only understanding genocide, but also for researching how the state aligns with capital to commit genocide. In the United States, the repression of Black people occurred in the name of white supremacy, and of profits. A similar thing can be said of Palestine. While the genocide of the Palestinians is being justified through a set of racist pronouncements by zionists and their allies, zionist-aligned corporations and complicit states are reaping super-profits from land dispossession, military contracts, and, increasingly monopoly control of mass media and digital platforms. Who profits from the genocide of African Americans, Robeson asks? We must also ask: who profits from the genocide of the Palestinian people?
We reprint Paul Robeson’s essay “Genocide Stalks the U.S.A.” below.
Genocide Stalks the U.S.A.
Paul Robeson
Out of the lessons of the barbarities of Nazi Germany, the voice of outraged mankind caused the General Assembly of the United Nations to adopt a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The opening statement of this historic petition dispels the generally held misconception that the crime of genocide can be charged only when there is mass extermination of a people.
As defined in the United Nations Convention, genocide includes “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part.”
It is not difficult to understand why this Convention has never been ratified by the Senate of the United States. This book [We Charge Genocide], in fact, reveals that a determined effort has been made by white supremacy to block U.S. signature. From the openly terrorist Ku Klux Klan to the more suave spokesmen of the American Bar Association, there has been a brazenly open recognition of the applicability of the convention to the treatment of the Negro people in the United States.
Let anyone review the history of the Negro people of these United States. Tens of millions sacrificed in the slave ships and on the plantations. Till this day terror stalking this great people, not only in the South, but in the Peekskills, Ciceros, Detroits. Constant warning to stay in “your place,” accept the serf-like status imposed by a resurgent Dixiecrat South brazenly waving its Confederate flags in this year of 1952.
How parallel to the condition of another great people — the Jewish people of Nazi Germany. During the trials at Nuremberg — the very base of the genocide convention — I was chairman of a delegation to the President of these United States. A leading church-woman observed in this conference that we could not morally sit in judgment at Nuremberg while lynchings were rampant in the South (this was 1946), while an Isaac Woodard (a World War II vet) had his eyes gouged cut. The President said the Nuremberg trials had “nothing to do with the South,” that ours was a domestic problem. I observed that the history of Nazi thought proved that they had learned much from the South, that a straight line led from Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama to the Berlin and Dachau of Hitler.
I stood in Dachau in 1945 and saw the ashes and bones of departed victims. I might have seen the ashes of some of my brothers in Groveland, Florida, just the other day—or in Martinsville a few months back.
And when we come to other aspects of genocide—of stifling the growth of a whole people—of holding them in constant threat of ‘operations killer’—there can be no such evasive answer.
The very reason for the Genocide Convention is to prevent the destruction of a people. The daily lives of the Negro people testify as to the “intent” of their persecutors. The business of the United Nations is to exercise its powers to remove this threat and terror.
While the Voice of America beams its hypocritical concern for the welfare of the peoples behind the socalled Iron Curtain, the Genocide Convention remains unratified by the U.S. Government. But our failure to sign could not block the adoption of the Convention. By January, 1951, the requisite number of member nations had signed and it is now binding on our government.
Now that the Convention is in effect, the State Department is trying to move it into its war arsenal. Not an issue of the Sunday Times seems to go by without a sob story in which some groups of fascist emigres charge genocide against the Soviet Union or the new democracies which have ended national oppression and outlawed racism.
William L. Patterson, National Executive Secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, has added still another contribution to his magnificent record in the struggle for Negro freedom by seeing that the Genocide Convention must become a weapon for liberation of his people.
The American people will some day take pride in the fact that at a time when the United States Government was the driving force behind the oppression of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, it was boldly called before the bar of world opinion by progressive Americans who exposed its pretensions of ”democracy” and proved it guilty of genocide within
The demagogues and apologists for white supremacy will never be able to brush this document aside. The facts gathered here are irrefutable. Every assertion has been documented.
And since the publication of this petition, we can add the bloody documentation of new genocidal acts like the murder of Harry T. Moore, an N.A.A.C.P. leader, and his wife on Christmas night in Florida, and the mockery of the local authorities and the ballyhooed FBI pretending inability to apprehend those responsible for this brazen act of terror.
The Baltimore Afro-American, a leading Negro newspaper, has revealed that the State Department asked Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to attack this petition. Instead, in his syndicated column, Mr. White declared, “The United States has been hit in its most vulnerable spot by We Charge Genocide, an appeal to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress…The most immediate and effective step is for the United States to plead guilty to the charges.” Of course, Mr. White went on to expound his usual gradualist credo about how “the other side should be given the widest possible publicity.”
We, the people, charge genocide. We, Negro and white petitioners, declare that jim crow and segregation are a genocidal policy of government against the Negro people. The proof is all in this monumental book—the lynchings condoned and encouraged by government officials, the killings by the police authorities of state, the legal lynchings by the courts of our land, the racist laws. The violence and murder are all stamped with the government seal.
Yes, and economic genocide too, the silent, cruel killer. The petition presents all the terrible data — the death toll in Negro ghettoes, the prevention of access to medical treatment, the unemployment and the discrimination in employment, the denial of education. Out of the government’s own statistics, the petition makes the accusation:
“More than 30,000 Negroes die each year in the United States who would not have died if they had been white. In addition, the Negro people are robbed of more than eight years of life on the average.”
This petition does more than present facts. It digs into the meaning of these facts and bares the motivation for the anti-Negro genocide. “It is genocide for profit. The intricate superstructure of ‘law and order’ and extra-legal terror enforces an oppression that guarantees profit. . . . The prime mover of the mammoth and deliberate conspiracy to commit genocide against the Negro people in the United States is monopoly capital. Monopoly’s immediate interest is nearly four billions of dollars in superprofits that it extracts yearly from its exploitation and oppression of the Negro people.”
We have filed our petition with the United Nations not only on behalf of the 15,000,000 Negro people in the United States but, also, in the interests of all humanity. For we know that genocide at home inevitably develops into the genocide that is aggressive war. As Patterson declares in his introduction, “The Hitler crimes of awful magnitude, beginning as they did against the heroic Jewish people, finally drenched the world in blood.”
While this book was still in preparation, a delegation of the Women’s International Democratic Federation went to Korea and saw with their own eyes how the American government was practicing genocide against a colored people struggling for their independence.
The horrifying report of the women’s delegation and this petition belong side by side. Both are weapons in the same struggle for peace and freedom.
In the short time since its publication, the charge made in this petition has already begun to be heard in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But most of all, it must be heard and supported within the United States. All Americans who work for peace and civil rights must read this book, sell it in their communities, use its rich documentation and absorb its penetrating analysis of the meaning of the struggle for Negro rights in relation to the fight for world peace.
We of the true progressive America have the deepest and most sacred obligation, to our own land and to the people of the world, to preserve and hand on the honest traditions of our fathers — traditions of full equality for all, of the need to live in friendship and cooperation with all ways of life — reaching toward the fulfillment of the profoundest aspirations and hopes of all human kind.
Paul Robeson, “Genocide Stalks the U.S.A,” New World Review 20 no. 2 (1952).
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