Large-scale murder, even the destruction of entire populations, is not a product of modernity. The sacking and pillaging of conquered cities, and the rape and massacre of their inhabitants, has occurred across religious traditions and cultures. The Greeks did it to Troy; the Romans did it to Carthage—and both Greeks and Romans built national legends around the significance of those deeds. To their enemies in the ancient world, the Persians, Akkadians, Assyrians (and so forth) were legendary for their willingness to destroy cities and kill or transport entire populations. The deliberate killing of entire populations was not, moreover, a...
In previous chapters I have suggested that Human Rights Discourse opposes a polemical concept of the ethical to the twentieth-century concept of the political, which (as Carl Schmitt conceded) was also polemical.¹ Human Rights Discourse, I have argued, is against the ideologies of both revolution and counterrevolution that dominated much of the twentieth century even while it indirectly carries on significant parts of the counterrevolutionary project. To point this out is to criticize Human Rights Discourse for its historical specificity by calling attention to the forms of justice it excludes, often surreptitiously, in putting beneficiaries on the same footing as...