JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH
7
members of the in-group, such as by calling them traitors or otherwise questioning their
loyalty.33
Research from Rwanda illustrates the significance of in-group policing in the for
mation of groups necessary for carrying out genocide. But in-group policing is important
beyond mobilizing direct participation in killing. The Holocaust in Germany provides two
examples. Firstly, the eventual physical murder of German Jews required isolating them
from the rest of German society, transforming diverse forms of social life into “social
death”34 – their exclusion from what Fein called “the universe of obligation of the domi
nant group.”35 Even as antisemitism was widespread in Germany, encouraging nonJewish Germans to cut off social relations with Jews still required systematic pressure
campaigns. Anti-Jewish boycotts implemented soon after the Nazis came to power, for
example, were not immediately successful. Instead, they relied upon a variety of strat
egies for shaming violators. Sentries were posted outside Jewish businesses to harass
patrons, for example, and names were read aloud at public meetings and rallies,
posted to billboards, and published in newspaper articles, sometimes accompanied by
photographs, and often shown in display cases built for this purpose.36 Secondly,
while there is clear scholarly consensus that Nazism developed into a popular movement
uniting a broad, diverse, and willing coalition in Germany, it also required early aggres
sive action to eliminate opposition. Even after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933,
leftist and liberal political parties, which had collectively won more votes in recent elec
tions, represented real alternative bases of power. Members were imprisoned by the
thousands as well as subjected to brutal attacks and public humiliation.37 The Nazis
had to construct new visions of what it meant to be a member of the dominant
group, in other words, even as they worked to exclude Jews from its universe of
obligation.
This section began by noting the narrow scope adopted by most analyses of Facebook
and genocide: they have focused primarily on content about the out-group, the Rohingya,
to the exclusion of practices involving speech that may not reference the out-group at all,
such as in-group policing. One final way to illustrate the problem of this approach is with
models that have been developed to identify places at risk of genocide. An early example
is Stanton’s “8 Stages of genocide” (Table 1).38
33
34
35
36
37
38
Susan Benesch et al., Dangerous Speech: A Practical Guide (Dangerous Speech Project, 2018), 17–18; contra Susan
Benesch, “Countering Dangerous Speech: New Ideas for Genocide Prevention,” Working Paper, US Holocaust Mem
orial Museum, 8–9 February 2014.
Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5;
also, Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence Against Jews in Provincial
Germany, 1919–1939 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014); Carolyn J. Dean, The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), Chap. 3.
Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust (New York: Free
Press, 1979), 9.
Hermann Beck, Before the Holocaust: Antisemitic Violence and the Reaction of German Elites and Institutions During the
Nazi Takeover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 157, 223, 231–5; Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide:
Hitler’s Community, 1918–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 38–40; Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft,
Chap. 4–5.
Peter Fritzsche, Hitler’s First Hundred Days: When Germans Embraced the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2021), Chap. 3–4; Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2004); Evans, “Raleigh Lecture
on History: Coercion and Consent in Nazi Germany,” Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007): 53–81.
Stanton’s model was first published it in 1998, with two more stages added in 2013. I use the original 8-stage model
here for the sake of brevity. Stanton, “The 8 Stages of Genocide,” Yale Program in Genocide Studies Working Paper 1
(1998); Stanton, “The Ten Stages of Genocide Handout” (Genocide Watch, 2013).