AUST & NZ JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY (July 1993) 26 (97-115) 97

HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF THE STATE:

THE CULTURE OF DENIAL·
Stanley Cohen!
Introduction
For personal and political reasons that I won't impose on you, I have gradually
moved during the last decade from "doing" criminology to "doing" human rights.
Living these years in Israel and faced by the mass violation of Palestinian rights in
the Israeli Occupied Territories, my academic pre-occupations have made way for
more activist work in the human rights field.
This has' meant dealing with different subjects from those of traditional
criminology or even the broader discourse of the sociologyof law and social control.
It has also meant getting used to a different style of work; the rhythms of human
rights organisations (deadline, press conference, organising, casework) are not those
of the leisurely university life; the genre of a human rights report (as I painfully
discovered) is not the same as a paper for an academic journal. This is altogether a
different intellectual subculture, with its own people, preoccupations, values and
references.
Of course, these different worlds do meet. Some subjects appear to be pretty
much the same (law, police, prisons, courts, violence, victims, justice ...); there are
the familiar debates between practitioners and theorists; research methods are not
very different from regular social science work (a shoddy human rights report is bad
for the same reasons as a shoddy research paper).
The research project on which I have just started working, though, stems more
consciously from my human rights involvement than my academic criminology. So,
when I was invited to give this lecture, my first thought was that I had nothing much
.to say to a criminological audience. On second thoughts, it seemed to me that the
,ways these fields have diverged despite their common grounds seemed worthy of
attention. To frame my human rights topic for a criminological audience might be a
worthwhile exercise.
My lecture has two aims. The first is to note some substantive lines of enquiry
about my subject, the sociology of denial. The second is to suggest that the
criminological agenda should take into account the subject of crimes of the state and
its even wider referent, that is, human rights violations. Pretentiously - others
before me have tried and failed - this second task is comparable to what
Sutherland set himself in placing white collar crime on the criminological agenda.
Which of these two tasks is more important? Frankly, the first - the substance of
my question. But in deference to the occasion - the John Barry Memorial Lecture
at the conference of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology - I'll
start with my second task, looking for the criminological connection.
Criminology and Crimes of the State
It would be ludicrous to claim that Western criminology over the past decades has
completely ignored the subject of state crime or the broader discourse of human

• John Barry Memorial Lecture, University of Melbourne, 30 September, 1992. The research referred to
in this lecture is funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation International Human Rights Programme.
flnstitute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University, Jerusalem 91905, ISRAEL
98 STANLEY COHEN (1993) 26 ANZJ Crim

rights. My case does not need the standard PhD opening: everyone has ignored the
subject except me. What I am saying, is that the subject has often been raised and
then its implications conveniently repressed. This is a process strangely reminiscent
of my substantive interest in the sociology of denial: how information is known but
its implications are not acknowledged.
The first significant confrontation with the subject came in the early phase of
radical criminology in the late sixties. That favourite debate of the times - "who are
the real criminals?" - naturally turned attention from street crime to white
collar/corporate crime and then to the wider notion of "crimes of the powerful". The
particular context of the Vietnam War, pushed our slogans ("Hey, hey LBJ! How
many kids have you killed today?") explicitly in the direction of "crimes of the state".
In criminology, this sentiment was expressed in the much cited paper by the
Schwendingers (1970) entitled "Defenders of Order or Guardians of Human
Rights?" Looking back at this text, it appears a missed opportunity to deal with the
core issues of state crime.
Quite rightly, the Schwendingers saw themselves going in the same direction, but
a step further than Sutherland by invoking the criterion of social injury to define
crime. In the case of white collar crime, this mandated us to go beyond criminal law
into the areas of civil and administrative law. The Schwendingers then noted that if
Sutherland had consistently followed what they rightly call his "ethical" rather than
legal categorisation, he should also have arrived at those other socially injurious
actions which are not defined as either criminal or civil law violations. So far, so
good. But their argument then goes awry.
Firstly, they cite as examples of other socially injurious action (their only
examples) "genocide and economic exploitation". Now, besides the fact that these
are hardly morally equivalent categories, genocide is crucially different from
economic exploitation. It is recognised in current political discourse as crime by the
state; it is clearly illegal by internal state laws; and since the Nuremberg Judgements
and the 1948 UN Convention Against Genocide, it is a "crime" according to
international law. Genocide belongs to the same conceptual universe as "war
crimes" and "crimes against humanity". By any known criteria, genocide is more self
evidently criminal than economic exploitation.
The Schwendingers make no such distinctions nor try to establish the criminality
of human rights violations. Instead they launch into a moral crusade against
imperialistic war, racism, sexism and economic exploitation. We might agree with
their ideology and we might even use the term "crime" rhetorically to describe
racism, sexism and economic exploitation. This type of sixties rhetoric indeed
anticipates the current third and fourth generation "social rights". A more restricted
and literal use of the concept "state crime" however, is both more defensible and
useful. If we come from the discourse of human rights, this covers what is known in
the jargon (for once, not euphemistic ) as "gross" violations of human rights -
genocide, mass political killings, state terrorism, torture, disappearances. Ifwe come
from the discourse of criminology, we are talking about clear criminal offences -
murder, rape, espionage, kidnapping, assault.
I don't want to get into definitional quibbles. Enough to say that the extension of
criminology into the terrain of state crimes, can be justified without our object of
study becoming simply everything we might not like at the time. Let us see what
happened after that mid-sixties to mid-seventies phase when questions about state
crimes and human rights were placed on the criminological agenda by the radicals.
 HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF mE STATE: THE CULTURE OF DENIAL 99

What mostly happened was that the human rights connection became lost. In the
discourse of critical criminology, the putative connection between crime and politics
took two different directions, both quite removed from the idea of state crime.
The first was the short-lived notion of the criminal as proto-revolutionary actor
and the extension of this to all forms of deviance. This whole enterprise - referred
to as the "politicisation of deviance" - was soon abandoned and eventually
denounced as naive, romantic and sentimental. 1 The second connection - which
turned out the more productive - was the focus on the criminalising power of the
state. This led to the whole revisionist discourse on the sociology of law, social
control and punishment that has remained so salient and powerful.
But neither direction leads anywhere near towards talking about state crimes. The
subject simply faded away from criminological view in the mid-seventies to
mid-eighties. By the time left realist criminology appeared, we move entirely from
"crimes of the state" back to the "state of crime." Today, the subject has re-appeared
from two contexts, one external to the discipline, the other internal.
The external context is the incremental growth of the international human rights
movement itself. Emerging from the United Nations Charter and the great
declarations and conventions of the next decade, from international governmental
organisations such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe, from fledgling pressure
groups such as Amnesty International to the vast current list of national and
international non-governmental organisations, the human rights movement has
become a major institutional force. Pushed by the rhetorical use of "human rights"
by the Carter Adminstration about Latin America and its critique of the Soviet
Union, the ideal of human rights took on a powerful life of its own. It has become a
secular religion.
This discourse, of course, is very dense, complex and contradictory (Social Justice,
1989). "Human Rights" has become a slogan raised from most extraordinary
different directions. Progressive forces and organisations like Amnesty can enlist
famous rock stars to perform in defence of international human rights. Right wing
pressure groups in the USA can unseat politicians and defeat Supreme Court
nominations by invoking the human rights of the unborn foetus. Civil liberties
groups defend pornography on the grounds of freedom of speech and the women's
movement attack this freedom as an assault on the human rights of women. Nations
with the most appalling record of state violence and terror can self-righteously join
together in the UN to condemn other nations for their human rights violations.
Some human rights activists are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, others are jailed,
tortured, have disappeared or been assassinated. The human rights of one group are
held sacred, the rights of another totally ignored ... and so on.
But whatever the concept of human rights means, it has become a dominant
narrative. Arguably, with the so-called death of the old meta-narratives of marxism,
liberalism and the cold war, human rights will become the normative political
language of the future. I have no time to go into its conceptual ambiguities - the
difference between civil and human rights, the relationship between political and
human rights work, the tension between universalism and cultural relativism. Nor
can I raise the numerous policy issues of policing, enforcement and international
law. One of the most salient issues for criminologists, raised dramatically by the
current horrors in the former Yugoslavia, is the long-proposed establishment of an
international criminal tribunal.
So this is one way - from the outside - that criminologists as citizens who read
the news, must have become aware of the subject of human rights violations and
crimes of the state. Not that you know about this awareness if you just read
100 STANLEY COHEN (1993) 26 ANZJ Crim

criminological texts. There is, however, one intemal way in which the subject has
been registered in criminology. This is through the growth of victimology.
There are many obvious echoes of human rights issues in victimologicalliterature
- whether in the feminist debate about female victims of male sexualised violence;
in talking about children and children's rights; in the concern about victims of
corporate crime, ecological abuse, etc. Some students (Karmen, 1990) find these
echoes only in "radical" rather than "conservative" or "liberal" victiminology. The
conservative tendency is concerned with victims of street crime, making offenders
accountable, encouraging self reliance and advocating retributive justice. The liberal
tendency includes white collar crime, is concerned with making the victim "whole"
and advocates restitution and reconciliation. Only the radical tendency extends to all
forms of human suffering and sees law and the criminal justice system as implicated
in this suffering.
This distinction, though, between conservative, liberal and radical tendencies is
not always clear. And in the context of one crucial subject - what happens to state
criminals such as torturers after democratisation or a change in regime - the
distinction breaks down altogether. Here, it is the "radicals" who call for
punishment and retributive justice, while it is the "conservatives" who invoke ideals
such as reconciliation to call for impunity."
In any event, these external and internal inputs are slowlymaking their way into
criminology. In the mainstream, this can be seen in recent standard textbooks which
explicity deal with the subject of state crime, and others which consider the human
rights definition of crime.
In the radical stream, there is Barak's recent (1991) volume Crime By the Capitalist
State. The editor makes a strong case for including state criminality in the field of
criminology - both on the grounds that the consequences of state crimes are more
widespread and destructive than traditional crime and because this would be a
logical extension of the already accepted move into the field of white collar crime.
The overall tone of the volume, though, is too redolent of the sixties' debates:
general ideas about discrimination and abuse of political and economic power, the
focus only on capitalism and the disproportionate attention on worldwide low
intensity warfare by the USA (CIA, counter-insurgency etc).
Despite this recent interest, major gaps in the criminological discourse remain:
(a) First, there is little understanding that a major source of criminalisation at
national and international levels draws on the rhetoric of human rights. Significant
waves of moral enterprise and criminalisation over the last decade are derived not
from the old middle-class morality, the Protestant ethic nor the interests of
corporate capitalism, but from the feminist, ecological and human rights
movements. A major part of criminology is supposed to be the study of law making
- criminalisation - but we pay little attention to the driving force behind so many
new laws: the demand for protection from "abuses of power". The radical slogans of
the sixties have become the common place of any government and inter-government
forum. Alongside our standard research on domestic legislatures and ministries of
justice, we should see what our foreign ministries are doing - at the Council of
Europe, the United Nations, etc.
(b) Another important defect in recent literature is its American focus. It is
pre-occupied with "exposures" - of the CIA (eg, drug running in Vietnam), FBI
surveillance methods, the global drug wars, international arms dealing, etc. This
results in a certain ethnocentrism, but also allows the derivative subjects (political
economy, globalisation, state propaganda, illegal clandestine operations, counter
intelligence) to be denied as being "normal politics" (like the white collar crime
 HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF THE STATE: THE CULTURE OF DENIAL 101

issue allowed the denial of "normal business"). For my purposes here, I want to
stress not the politicality of the subject but its criminality. For this, we don't need
theories of the state, we need merely to pick up the latest Amnesty Annual Report.
(c) If we have missed something about law making, we have ignored even more
the facts of victimisation. Again, there is a ritualistic acknowledgement of the
damage, harm and violence that are the obvious consequences of state crime - and
then we return to easier topics. It is as if we don't want to face these facts; as if - to
anticipate the substance of the second part of my lecture - we have denied their
implications. I am aware that phrases such as "crimes of the twentieth century"
sound bombastic - but for vast populations of the world, this is a fair
characterisation of those "gross violations of human rights": genocide, mass political
killings, disappearances, torture, rape by agents of state,"
This terrible record is known but (as I will show) simultaneously not known. Take
genocides and mass political killings only: the Turkish genocide of at least a million
Armenians; the Holocaust against six million Jews and the hundreds of thousands of
political opponents, gypsies and others; the millions killed under Stalin's regime; the
tribal and religious massacres in Burundi, Bengal and Paraguay; the mass political
killings in East Timor and Uganda; the "autogenocide" in Cambodia; the "ethnic
cleansing" in Bosnia; the death squads and disappearance in Argentina, Guatamala,
El Salvador. Or take torture - a practise supposedly eradicated from Europe by the
beginning of the 19th century and now routinely used in two thirds of the world.
To add up the deaths, injuries and destruction from all these sources and then
compare this to the cumulative results of homicide, assault, property crime and
sexual crime in even the highest crime countries of the world, is too tendentious an
exercise, too insulting to the intelligence. One cannot calibrate human suffering in
this way.
But criminologists do, after all talk about offence "seriousness". The standard
literature in this area - and allied debates on culpability, harm, responsibility and
the "just desserts" model - already compares street crime with white collar crime.
A current important contribution (von Hirsch and Jareborg, 1991) tries to gauge
criminal harm by using a "living .standard analysis". Von Hirsch and his colleague
have argued ingeniously that criminal acts can be ranked by a complicated scale of
"degrees of intrusion" on different kinds of legally protected interests: physical
integrity; material support and amenity; freedom from humiliation; privacy and
autonomy.
What von Hirsch calls "interests" are strikingly close to what are also called
"human rights". His examples, however, come only from the standard criminological
terrain of citizen against citizen. Including corporate crime would extend the list to
(business) organisations against citizen. This is certainly an interesting and
worthwhile exercise. It allows, for example, the ranking of forcible rape by a stranger
as very grave because this is so demeaning and gross an attack against the "freedom
from humiliation" interest; therefore rape at gun point becomes more serious than
armed robbery; date rape comes lower on the cumulative scale on grounds that
threat to bodily safety is eliminated, and so on.
But neither crimes of state nor the wider category of "political crime" are
mentioned. There is no logical reason why the identity of the offender should be
assumed to be fixed as citizen against citizen, rather than state agent against citizen
when talking about, say, murder, assault or rape. In fact, there are good moral
reasons why any grading of seriousness should take this into account - in particular,
the fact that the very agent responsible for upholding law, is actually responsible for
the crime. And there is a good empirical reason: that for large parts of the world's
102 STANLEY COHEN (1993) 26 ANZJ Crim

population, state agents (or para military groups, vigilantes or terrorists) are the
normal violators of your "legally protected interests".
I don't want to oversimplify the many conceptual objections and obstacles that
criminologists will legitimately raise to my glib appeal to include state crime in our
frame of reference. Most such objections fall under two categories:
First, there are the equivalent arguments to those used in the field of corporate
crime - that the state is not an actor and that individual criminal responsibility
cannot be identified. For corporate crime, this objection has been disposed of often
enough, most recently (and to my mind convincingly) by Braithwate and Fisse
(1990). The corporation engages in rational goal seeking behaviour; it can act; it can
have intentions; it can commit crimes. This is just as (though more complicatedly)
true for the state.
The second objection (again paralleled from Sutherland onwards in the case of
corporate crime) is that the resultant action is not "really" crime. Here, the
counter-arguments are complicated and come from a number of different directions:
(i) an appeal to international law and conventions on such concepts as "war crimes"
or "crimes against humanity"; (ii) a demonstration that these acts are illegal by
domestic criminal law and fit all criteria of "crime"; (iii) and even if the acts in
question are legal by internal state jurisdiction, then the question arises of how this
legal legitimation occurs. We have to remember (perhaps by inscribing this on our
consciousness each morning) that state crimes are not just the unlicenced terror of
totalitarian or fascist regimes, police states, dictatorships or military juntas. And in
even the most extreme of these regimes, such as Nazi Germany, the discourse of
legality is used (Muller, 1991).
One of the clearest and most eloquent texts for understanding these symbiotic
issues of responsiblity and criminality, is the 1985 trial in Argentina of the former
military junta members responsible for the mass killings, atrocities, disappearances
of the "dirty war". Reports of this trial (eg, by Amnesty International) should be on
all criminology reading lists.
The reasons why we don't make these connections are less logical than
epistemological. The political discourse of the atrocity is, as I will soon show,
designed to hide its presence from awareness. This is not a matter of secrecy, in the
sense of lack of access to information, but an unwillingness to confront anomalous or
disturbing information. Take the example of torture. Democratic-type societies -
the French in Algeria (Maran, 1989); the British in Northern Ireland; the Israelis in
the Occupied Territories (Cohen, 1991) - could all proclaim their adherence to
international conventions and domestic laws against torture. This called for a
complex discourse of denial that what they were doing constituted torture. No, it was
something else, "special procedures" or "moderate physical pressure". So something
happened - but it was not illegal. In more totalitarian societies (with no
accountability, no free press, no independent judiciary) denial is simpler - you do
it, but say you do not. Nothing happened.
The standard vocabulary of official (government) denial weaves its way - at times
simulaneously, at times sequentially - through a complete spiral of denial. First you
try "it didn't happen". There was no massacre, no one was tortured. But then the
media, human rights organisations and victims show that it does happen: here are
the graves; we have the photos; look at the autopsy reports. So you have to say that
what happened was not what it looks to be but really something else: a "transfer of
population", "collateral damage", "self defence". And then - the crucial subtext -
what happened anywaywas completely justified - protecting national security, part
of the war against terrorism. So:
 HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF 11-IE STATE: 11-IE CULTURE OF DENIAL 103

• It doesn't happen here

• If it does, "it" is something else
• Even if it is what you say it is, it is justified
Faced with this spiral of denial, criminologists may not be expected to respond
very differently from ordinary citizens. But the debate is only a little more complex
and dramatic than debates about whether white collar crime is really crime. I say
more "dramatic" because we are forced back not just to questions about what is
normal business, but what is the normal state. Take, for example, the question of
jurisdiction and punishment. Precisely because we expect so little from domestic and
intemationallaw as sanctions against gross state crimes (against our own or other
citizens), we seldom frame human rights violations in criminal terms. Talking about
the limitations in the 1948 UN Convention Against Genocide and in the UN Charter
itself, the anthropologist, Leo Kuper, remarks with characteristic irony that an
unstated assumption of the international discourse is that:
... the sovereign territorial state claims, as an integral part of its sovereignty, the
right to commit genocide or engage in genocidal massacres against people under
its rule, and that the United Nations for all practical purposes, defends this right
(Kuper, 1981, p 161).
Obviously, this is very complex territory - more complex than I can even hint at
here - and it is understandable why mainstream criminology is reluctant to become
too immersed in these debates. Their absence in "left realist" criminology is stranger
to explain. After all, the ontological base here is a realist philosophy which starts
with harm, victimisation, seriousness, suffering and supposed indifference to all this
by the adolescent left idealism of the sixties.
I will return to some possible explanations for this blindsight. On one level, this is
nothing more sinister than a Western ethnocentrism preoccupied with its own
national concerns and secure in the great achievement of liberal capitalism; the
separation of crime from the state. On another more interesting level, this stems
from the universal tendency to see only what is convenient to see.

The Culture of Denial

Let me now turn to my substantive topic - denial. How did I get to this subject?
During the decade in which I have lived in Israel, but especially the past five years
of the intifada (the uprising of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories), I have been
puzzled by the apparent lack of overt reaction (dissent, criticism, protest) in just
those sectors of Israeli society where one would expect to be reacting more. In the
face of clear information about what's going on - escalating levels of violence and
repression, beatings, torture, daily humiliations, collective punishment (curfews,
house demolition, deportations), death-squad-type killings by army undercover units
- the level of shame, outrage and protest, is not psychologically or morally
appropriate.
Of course there are no objective scales of psychological or moral
"appropriateness". But many observers, inside and outside the country, have sensed
that this part of the public should find something more disturbing and be prepared
to act accordingly.
Remember that I am talking not about that clear majority of the population who
support these measures and would not object to even more severe repression. My
object of study is the minority: the enlightened, educated middle class, responsive to
messages of peace and co-existence, first to condemn human rights violations
everywhere else in the world.
104 STANLEY COHEN (1993) 26 ANZJ Crim

Note that unlike most societies where gross human rights violations occur, the
facts are both private and public knowledge. Nearly everyone has direct personal
knowledge, especially from army service. These are not conscripts or mercenary
soldiers drawn from the underclass; everybody serves (including the middle class
liberals) or has a husband, son, cousin or neighbour in reserve duty. There is a
relatively open press, liberal in tone, which regularly and clearly exposes what is
happening in the Occupied Territories. No one - least of all the group which
interests me - can say those terrible (though, as I will show, complicated) words "I
didn't know."
It is way beyond my scope to discuss the special reasons in Israel for denial,
passivity or indifference. These are part of a complex political history - of being
Jewish, of Zionism, of fear and insecurity. I mention this case only because it led me
to comparisons, to looking for similarities and differences in other societies. I went
back to my experience of growing up in apartheid South Africa. More fatefully, 1
turned to the emblematic events of this century: the Holocaust "texts" about the
good Germans who knew what was happening; the lawyers and doctors who
colluded; the ordinary people who passed by the concentration camps everyday and
claimed not to know what was happening; the politicians in Europe and America
who did not believe what they were told. Then from this one historical event, I went
to the contemporary horrors reported every day in the mass media and documented
by human rights reports - about Bosnia, Peru, Guatamala, Burma, Uganda ...
All this - and the relevant social scientific literature - led me back to versions of
the same universal question. This is not Milgram's famous question of how ordinary
people will behave in terrible ways, but rather how ordinary, even good people, will
not react appropriately to knowledge of the terrible. Why, when faced by knowledge
of others' suffering and pain - particularly the suffering and pain resulting from
what are called "human rights violations" - does "reaction" so often take the form
of denial, avoidance, passivity, indifference, rationalisation or collusion?
I have mentioned the official state discourse: the pure denials (it didn't happen,
they are lying, the media are biased, the world community is just picking on us) and
the pure justifications (deterrence, self defence, national security, ideology,
information gathering). But my concern is not the actor but rather (back, in a
curious way, to labelling theory!) the audience. In the triangle of human suffering so
familiar to criminologists - the victim, to whom things are done; the perpetrator,
who is activelycausing the suffering; the observer who sees and knows - my interest
lies in this third corner: the audience, the observers, the bystanders.
For my purposes here, I want to consider a specific group of obselVers - not
those whose avoidance derives from (crudely speaking) their support for the action.
If they see nothing morally wrong or emotionally disturbing in what is happening,
why should they do anything? In this sense, their denial or passivity is "easy" to
explain. My interest is more in the subgroup who are ideologically predisposed to be
against what is happening, to be disturbed by what they know. How do they react to
their knowledge of the terrible?
Before presenting some lines of enquiry into this subject, let me note an important
distinction which I won't have time to follow through. In talking about the denial of
atrocities or human rights violations, there is a world of difference between reacting
to your own government's actions as distinct from what might be happening in a
distant country. My response, say, as an Australian, to newspaper revelations about
the treatment of Aborigines in custody, follows different lines from my response to
sitting in Melbourne and reading a human rights report about death squads in
EI Salvador.
 HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF THE STATE: THE CULTURE OF DENIAL 105

I have only just started work on this subject and can present you with not much
more than my original research proposal. First, I will list some of the more useful
bodies of literature which deal - directly, but more often obliquely - with the
general phenomenon of denial. Then I will give a preliminary classification of the
major forms of denial. Finally, I will note a few questions from my fieldwork on
human rights organisations. Through interviews, analysis of publications,
educational material advertisements and campaign evaluations, I am trying to
understand how human rights messages are disseminated and received.
This last part of the work is a study in communication. The sender is the
international human rights community (directly or through the mass media). The
audience is our real and metaphorical bystanders. The message is something like this
(to quote from an actual Amnesty International advert in Britain in 1991):
Brazil has solved the Problem ofhow to keep kids off the street. Kill Them.
What bodies of literature might be of relevance?
(1) The Psychology ofDenial
Orthodox psychoanalysis sees denial as an unconscious defence mechanism for
coping with guilt and other disturbing psychic realities. Freud originally
distinguished between "repression" which applies to defences against internal
instinctual demands and "denial" (or what he called "disavowal") which applies to
defences against the claims of external reality.
With a few exceptions, pure psychoanalytic theory has paid much less attention to
denial in this sense than repression (but see Edelstein, 1989). We have to look in the
more applied fields of psychoanalysis (or its derivatives) for studies about the denial
of external information. This yields a mass of useful material. There is the rich
literature on the denial of knowledge about fatal disease (especially cancer and
more recently, AIDS) affecting self or loved ones. More familiar to criminologists,
there is the literature on family violence and pathology: spouse abuse, child abuse,
incest etc. The concept of denial is standard to describe a mother's reaction on
"discovering" that her husband had been sexually abusing their daughter for many
years: "I didn't notice anything". In this case, the concept implies that in fact the
mother did "know" - how could she not have? - but that this knowledge was too
unbearable to confront.
The subject of denial has also been dealt with by cognitive psychology and
information theory. Of particular interest is the "denial paradox": in order to use the
term "denial" to describe a person's statement "I didn't know", you have to assume
that he or she knew or knows about what it is he or she claims not to know
(otherwise the term "denial" is inappropriate).
Cognitive psychologists have used the language of information processing,
selective perception, filtering, attention span etc, to understand the phenomenon of
how we notice and simultaneously do not notice (Goleman, 1985). Some have even
argued that the neurological phenomenon of "blindsight" suggests a startling
possibility: that one part of the mind may know just what it is doing, while the part
that supposedly knows, remains oblivious of this.
We are all familiar, from basic social psychology, with the notion of cognitive bias:
the selection of information to fit existing perceptual frames. At the extreme,
information which is too threatening to absorb is shut out altogether. The mind
somehow grasps what is going on, but rushes a protective filter into place, steering
information away from what threatens. Information slips into a kind of "black hole
of the mind" - a blind zone of blocked attention and self deception. Attention is
106 STANLEY COHEN (1993) 26 ANZJ Crim

thus diverted from facts or their meaning. Thus, the "vital lies" sustained by family
members about violence, incest, sexual abuse, infidelity, unhappiness. Lies continue
unrevealed, covered up by the family's silence, collusion, alibis and conspiracies
(Goleman, 1985).
Similar processes have been well documented outside both the social psychology
laboratory and intimate settings like the family. The litany by observers of atrocities
is all too familiar: "we didn't see anything", "no one told us", "it looked different at
the time"."
In addition to psychoanalytical and cognitive theory, there is also the tradition in
philosophical psychology concerned with questions of self knowledge and self
deception. The Sartrean notion of "bad faith" is of particular interest in implying -
contrary to psychoanalytical theory - that the denial is indeed conscious.

(2) Bystanders and Rescuers

Another body of literature more obviously relevant (and more familiar to
criminologists) derives from the victimological focus on the bystander. The classic
"bystander effect" has become a cliche: how witnesses to a crime will somehow
disassociate themselves from what is happening and not help the victim. The
prototype is the famous Kitty Genovese case. (One night in New York in 1964, a
young woman, Kitty Genovese, was savagely assaulted in the street just before
reaching her apartment. Her assailant attacked her over a period of forty minutes
while she struggled, battered and screaming, to reach her apartment. Her screams
and calls for help were heard by at least 38 neighbours who, from their own windows
saw or heard her struggle. No one intervened directly or by calling the police.
Eventually a patrol car arrived - too late to save her life.)
Studies of the bystander effect (Sheleff, 1978) suggest that intervention is less
likely to occur under three conditions: -
(i) Diffusion ofresponsibility - so many others are watching, why should I be the one
to intervene? Besides, it's none of my business.
(ii) Inabilityto identifywith the victim - even if I see someone as a victim, I won't act
if I cannot sympathise or emphathise with their suffering. We help our family,
friends, nation, in-group - not those excluded from our moral universe. (Journal of
Social Issues, 1990). In fact, those who are outside our moral universe may be
blamed for their predicament (the common experience of women victims of sexual
violence). If full responsibility is laid on the political out -group (they provoked us,
they had it coming), this releases you from your obligation to respond.
(iii) Inabilityto conceiveofeffective intervention - even if you do not erect barriers of
denial, even if you feel genuine moral or psychological unease ("I feel so awful about
what's going on in Bosnia", "I just can't get those pictures from Somalia out of my
mind"), this will not necessarily result in intervention. Observers will not act if they
do not know what to do, if they feel powerless and helpless themselves, if they don't
see any reward in helping, or if they fear punishment if they help.
These processes are of obvious relevance to my work on human rights violations.
There are immediate and literal "bystanders": all massacres, disappearances and
atrocities have their witnesses. And there are also metaphorical bystanders;
remember the reader looking at the Amnesty adverts about street kids being killed
in Brazil or dissidents being tortured in Turkey: Is this really my problem? Can I
identify with these victims? What can I do about it anyway?
The obverse of the bystander effect has generated its own special discourse. Just
as interesting as the social bases of indifference, are the conditions under which
people are aroused to intervene - often at great personal cost and risk. There is a
 HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF THE STATE: THE CULTURE OF DENIAL 107

vast ranging literature here: experimental studies on the social psychology of

altruism and pro-social behaviour; the sociology of charity and philanthropy;
philosophical and economic discussions of altruism (notably attempts to reconcile
the phenomenon to rational choice theory); historical studies of helping, rescuing,
altruism, the Good Samaritan. The best known of this work deals with rescuers of
Jews in Nazi Europe (Oliner and Oliner, 1988).

(3) Neutralisation Theory

More familiar ground to criminologists, is the body of literature known as
"motivational accounts" or "vocabulary of motives" theory. The application of this
theory in Sykes and Matza's (1957) "techniques of neutralisation" paper is a
criminological classic; there is no need to explain the idea to this audience.
The theory assumes that motivational accounts which actors (offenders) give of
their (deviant) behaviour must be acceptable to their audience (or audiences).
Moreover, accounts are not just post facto improvisations, but are drawn upon in
advance from the cultural pool of motivational vocabularies available to actors and
observers (and honoured by systems of legality and morality). Remember Sykes and
Matza's original list; each technique of neutralisation is a way of denying the moral
bind of the law and the blame attached to the offence: denial of injury ("no one got
hurt"); denial of victim ("they started it"; "it's all their fault",); denial of
responsibility ("I didn't mean to do it", "they made me do it"); condemnation of the
condemners ("they are just as bad") and appeal to higher loyalties (friends, gang,
family, neighbourhood).
Something very strange happens if we apply this list not to the techniques for
denying or neutralising conventional delinquency but to human rights violations and
state crimes. For Sykes and Matza's point was precisely that delinquents are not
"political" in the sense implied by subcultural theory; that is, they are not committed
to an alternative value system nor do they withdraw legitimacy from conventional
values. The necessity for verbal neutralisation shows precisely the continuing bind of
conventional values.
But exactly the same techniques appear in the manifestly political discourse of
human rights violations - whether in collective political trials (note, for example,
the Nuremberg trials or the Argentinian junta trial) or officialgovernment responses
to human rights reports (a genre which 1 am studying) or media debates about war
crimes and human rights abuses. 1will return soon to "literal denial", that first twist
of the denial spiral which 1 identified earlier ( it didn't happen, it can't happen here,
.they are all liars). Neutralisation comes into play when you acknowledge (admit)
that something happened - but either refuse to accept the category of acts to which
it is assigned ("crime" or "massacre") or present it as morally justified. Here are the
original neutralisation techniques, with corresponding examples from the realm of
human rights violations:
• denial of injury - they exaggerate, they don't feel it, they are used to
violence, see what they do to each other.
• denial of victim - they started it, look what they've done to us; they are the
terrorists, we are just defending ourselves, we are the real victims.
• denial of responsibility - here, instead of the criminal versions of
psychological incapacity or diminished responsibility (I didn't know what 1
was doing, 1 blacked out, etc) we find a denial of individual moral
responsiblity on the grounds of obedience: 1 was following orders, only
108 STANLEY COHEN (1993) 26 ANZJ Crim

doing my duty, just a cog in the machine. (For individual offenders like the
ordinary soldier, this is the most pervasive and powerful of all denial
systems).
• condemnation of the condemners - here, the politics are obviously more
explicit than in the original delinquency context. Instead of condemning the
police for being corrupt and biased or teachers for being hypocrites, we
have the vast discourse of official denial used by the modern state to protect
its public image: the whole world is picking on us; they are using double
standards to judge us; it's worse elsewhere (Syria, Iraq, Guatamala or
wherever is convenient to name); they are condemning us only because of
their anti-semitism (the Israeli version), their hostility to Islam (the Arab
version), their racism and cultural imperialism in imposing Western values
(all Third World tyrannies).
• appeal to higher loyalty - the original subdued "ideology" is now total and
self-righteous justification. The appeal to the army, the nation, the volk, the
sacred mission, the higher cause - whether the revolution, "history", the
purity of Islam, Zionism, the defence of the free world or state security. As
the tragic events of the last few years show, despite the end of the cold war,
the end of history and the decline of meta narratives, there is no shortage of
"higher loyalties", old and new.
Let us remember the implications of accounts theory for our subject. Built into the
offender's action, is the knowledge that certain accounts will be accepted. Soldiers
on trial for, say, killing a peaceful demonstrator, can offer the account of "obeying
orders" because this will be honoured by the legal system and the wider public. This
honouring is, of course, not a simple matter: Were the orders clear? Did the soldier
suspect that the order was illegal? Where in the chain of command did the order
originate from? These, and other ambiguities, make up the stuff of legal, moral and
political discourses of denial.
I have no time here to apply each of these theoretical frameworks -
psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, bystander theory, motivational accounts etc -
to my case study of reactions to knowledge of human rights violations and state
crimes. (There are obviously also many other relevant fields: political socialisation
and mobilisation, mass media analysis, collective memory). For illustration only, let
me list some elementary forms of denial which these theories might illuminate.
I will distinguish three forms of denial, each of which operates at (i) the individual
or psychic level and (ii) at the organised, political, collective or official level.

(1) Denial ofthe Past

At the individual level, there are the complex psychic mechanisms which allow us to
"forget" unpleasant, threatening or terrible information. Memories of what we have
done or seen or known are selected out and filtered.
At the collective level, there are the organised attempts to cover up the record of
past atrocities. The most dramatic and successful example in the modern era is the
eighty years of organised denial by successive Turkish governments of the 1915-17
genocide against the Armenians - in which some one and half million people lost
their lives (Hovanissian, 1986). This denial has been sustained by deliberate
propaganda, lying and cover-ups, forging of documents, suppression of archives and
bribing of scholars. The West, especially the USA, has colluded by not referring to
the massacres in the UN, ignoring memorial ceremonies and by surrendering to
Turkish pressure in NATO and other arenas of strategic cooperation.
 HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF THE STATE: THE CULTURE OF DENIAL 109

The less successful example, of course, is the so called "revisionist" history of

holocaust of European Jews, dismissed as a "hoax" or a "myth".
At both levels, we can approach the process of denial through its opposite: the
attempt to recover or uncover the past. At the individual level, the entire
psychoanalytic procedure itself is a massive onslaught on individual denial and
self-deception. At the political level, there is the opening of collective memory, the
painful coming to terms with the past, the literal and metaphorical digging up of
graves when regimes change and try to exorcise their history.

(2) Literal Denial

Here we enter the grey area sketched out by psychoanalysis and cognitive theory. In
what senses can we be said to "know" about something we profess not to know
about? If we do shut something out of knowledge, is this unconscious or conscious?
Under what conditions (for example, information overload or desensitisation) is
such denial likely to take place?
There are many different versions of literal denial, some of which appear to be
wholly individual, others which are clearly structured by the massive resources of the
state. We didn't know, we didn't see anything, it couldn't have happened without us
knowing (or it could have happened without us knowing). Or: things like this can't
happen here, people like us don't do things like this. Or: you can't believe the source
of your knowledge: - victims, sympathisers, human rights monitors, journalists are
biased, partial or ignorant.
The psychological ambiguities of "literal denial" and their political implications
are nicely illustrated by the psychoanalyst John Steiner's re-interpretation of the
Oedipus drama (Steiner, 1985 and 1990).
The standard version of the legend is a tragedy in which Oedipus is a victim of fate
who bravely pursues the truth. At the beginning he does not know the truth (that he
has killed his father, that he had sexual relations with his mother); at the end he
does. This is taken as a paradigm for the therapeutic process itself: the patient in
analysis to whom, gradually and painfully, the secrets of the unconscious are
revealed. But alongside this version, Steiner shows, Sophocles also conveys a quite
different message in the original drama: the message is that the main characters in
the play must have been aware of the identity of Oedipus and realised that he had
committed patricide and incest. There is a deliberate ambiguity throughout the text
about the nature of this awareness - just how much did each character know? Each
of the participants (including Oedipus himself) and especially the various court
officials, had (good) different reasons for denying their knowledge, for staging a
cover up. The Oedipus story is not at all about the discovery of truth, but the denial
of truth - a cover up like Watergate, Iran Contra. Thus the question: how much did
Nixon or Bush "know"?
The ambiguity about how conscious or unconscious our knowledge is, how much
we are aware of what we say we are unaware, is nicely captured in Steiner's title
"Turning a Blind Eye". This suggests the possibility of simultaneously knowing and
not knowing. We are not talking about the simple lie or fraud where facts are
accessible but lead to a conclusion which is knowingly evaded. This, of course is
standard in the organised government cover up: bodies are burnt, evidence is
concealed, officials are given detailed instructions on how to lie. Rather, we are
talking about the more common situation where "we are vaguely aware that we
choose not to look at the facts without being conscious of what it is we are evading".
(Steiner, 1985, p 61)
110 STANLEY COHEN (1993) 26 ANZJ Crim

(3) lmplicatory Denial

The forms of denial that we conceptualise as excuses, justifications, rationalisations
or neutralisations, do not assert that the event did not happen. They seek to
negotiate or impose a different construction of the event from what might appear
the case. At the individual level, you know and admit to what you have done, seen or
heard about. At the organised level, the event is also registered but is subjected to
cultural reconstruction (for example, through euphemistic, technical or legalistic
terminology). The point is to deny the implications - psychological and moral - of
what is known. The common linguistic structure is ''yes, but". Yes, detainees are
being tortured but there is no other way to obtain information. Yes, Bosnian women
are being raped, but what can a mere individual thousands of miles away do about
it?
"Denial of Responsiblity", as I noted earlier, is one of the most common forms of
implicatory denial. The sociology of "crimes of obedience" has received sustained
attention, notably by Kelman and Hamilton (1989). The anatomy of obedience and
conformity - the frightening degree to which ordinary people are willing to inflict
great psychological and physical harm to others - was originally revealed by
Milgram's famous experiment. Kelman and Hamilton begin from history rather than
a university laboratory: the famous case of Lieuenant Calley and the My Lai
massacre during the Vietnam War in May 1968 when a platoon of American soldiers
massacred some 400 civilians. From this case and other "guilt free" or "sanctioned"
massacres, they extract a rather stable set of conditions under which crimes of
obedience will occur:
(i) Authorisation: when acts are ordered, encouraged, or tacitly approved by those
in authority, then normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey;
(ii) Routinisation: the first step is often difficult, but when you pass the initial moral
and psychological barrier, then the pressure to continue is powerful. You become
involved without considering the implications; it's all in a day's work. This tendency
is re-inforced by special vocabularies and euphemisms ("surgical strike") or a simple
sense of routine. (Asked about what he thought he was doing, Calley replied in one
of the most chilling sentences of all times: "It was no big deal");
(iii) Dehumanisation: when the qualities of being human are deprived from the
other, then the usual principles of morality do not apply. The enemy is described as
animals, monsters, gooks, sub-humans. A whole language excludes them from your
shared moral universe.
The conditions under which perpetrators behave can be translated into the very
bystander rationalisations which allow the action in the first place and then deny its
implications afterwards. As Kelman and Hamilton show in their analysis of
successive public opinion surveys (in which people were asked both to imagine how
they would react to a My Lai situation themselves and to judge the actual
perpetrators), obedience and authorisation are powerful justifications. And
observers as well as offenders are subject to desensitisation (the bombardment by
horror stories from the media to a point that you cannot absorb them any more and
they are no longer "news") and dehumanisation.
My research on human rights organisations (national and international) deals
with their attempts to overcome these barriers of denial. What is the difference
between working in your own country and trying to arouse an international audience
in distant and different places? What messages work best in mobilising public action
(whether going to a demonstration, donating money or joining an organisation like
Amnesty International)? Does focusing on a country work better than raising an
 HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF THE STATE: THE CULTURE OF DENIAL 111

issue (such as torture or the death penalty)? And which countries or which issues?
Are some techniques of confronting denial - for example, inducing guilt or
representing the horrors more vividly - counter-productive? Is there competition
for the human rights message within the same audiences (for example, from the
environmental movement)? ...
Conclusion
It is difficult to find a conclusion for one lecture of this type, even harder for two. My
first lecture was an attempt to nudge criminologists to be interested in state crimes
and human rights violations. My second lecture was a sketch for a sociology of
denial. In both cases, all I have done is to place familiar issues in different packages.
Instead of a conclusion, let me instead end with two footnotes. One raises - dare
I say - some meta-theoretical issues; the other introduces a little optimism into an
otherwise bleak story.
(1) Meta Theory
I mentioned the strange neglect of these issues by new realist criminologists and
suggested that what is at stake is their sense of reality. But "reality" is not a word
used too easily these days - or if used, only politically correct in inverted commas.
This is the legacy of post structuralism, deconstructionism and post modernism.
There are a number of trends in post modernist theory which - usually unwittingly
- impinge on the human rights discourse. Let me mention a few such meta issues:
First, there is the question of moral relativism. This is the familiar claim - now
supposedly finally vindicated - that if there is no universal, foundational base for
morality (the death of meta-narratives), then it is impossible to stake out universal
values (such as those enshrined in human rights standards). Then comes the
derivative claim that such values and standards are Western, ethnocentric,
individualistic, alien and imposed.
Now, whatever the historical record, this claim has some strange political
implications. The standard and age-old government denials of the applicability of
international human rights norms - we are different, we face special problems, the
world doesn't understand us - now acquire a new philosophical dignity. And
further, the condemners are condemned for being ethnocentric and imperialist.
A similar problem comes from the assertion that local struggles for human rights
lose their meaning because they are informed by the very universal foundations and
master narratives now so thoroughly discredited or tarnished. This is again a
complex debate; I side with those who argue that no amount of deconstructive
scepticism should deny the force with which we defend these values. It is surely a
bizarre sight for Western progressives to be telling human rights activists from the
Third World or Eastern Europe that their struggle is, after all, not worth the candle.
A second problem is posed by the proclaimed end of history. This is the current
round of the old "end of ideology" game: the collapse of international socialism
finally proving the triumph of Western democratic capitalism. Besides the poverty of
the case itself, it can make little sense for those still living between death squads,
famine, disease and violence. For them, history is not over. But even if one meta
narrative has won and there is nothing left for "history" in the industrialised world,
then how does this world react to what is happening elsewhere? Why - if not
because of racism, selfishness, greed, and the type of denial I've talked about - do
the victors not devote more resources to achieve these values elsewhere?
A third post modernist theme is even more directly relevant to my subject here -
and potentially even more destructive. This is the attack on all modes of rational
112 STANLEY COHEN (1993) 26 ANZJ Crim

enquiry which work with positivist categories of reality. The human rights movement
can live without absolute, foundational values. But it cannot live with a theory which
denies any way of knowing what has really happened.' All of us who carried the
anti-positivist banners of the sixties are responsible for the emergent
epistemological circus.
Its apotheosis was reached a year ago. On 29 March 1991, shortly after the
cessation of hostilities in the Gulf War - just as thousands were lying dead and
maimed in Iraq, the country's infra-structure deliberately destroyed by savage
bombing, the Kurds abandoned to their fate - the high priest of post-modernism,
Jean Baudrillard, published an article entitled "The Gulf War Has Not Taken
Place" (Baudrillard, 1991b). The "true belligerents" he argued, are those who thrive
on the ideology of the truth of this war.
He was only being consistent with an article he wrote a few days before the war
(Baudrillard, 1991 a) in which he predicted that it would never happen. The war
existed only as a figment of media simulation, of imaginary scenarios that exceeded
all limits of real world facticity. The war, Baudillard had solemnly declared, was
strictly unthinkable except as an exchange of threats so exorbitant that it would
guarantee that the-event would not take place. The "thing" would happen only in the
minds of its audience, as an extension of the video games imagery which had filled
our screens during the long build up. Dependent as we all were - prime time
viewers as well as generals - on these computer generated images, we might as well
drop all self-deluding distinctions between screen events and "reality".
Given this "prediction", it was unlikely that Baudrillard would be proved wrong if
the war really did break out. So indeed the "war" - a free floating signifier, devoid
of referential bearing - did not happen. To complain that he was caught out by
events only shows our theoretical naivete, our nostalgia for the old truth-telling
discourses.
What does one make of all this? I take my cue from Christopher Norris (1992)
who has devoted a splendid polemical book to attacking Baudrillard's theses on the
Gulf War. Norris is by no means a philistine critic or an unregenerated "positivist".
He is the author of altogether sympathetic studies of Derrida and
deconstructionism. And he concedes that Baudrillard makes some shrewd
observations about how the war was presented by its managers and the media: the
meaningless statistical data to create an illusory sense of factual reporting, the
absurd claims about "precision targeting", and "clever bombs" to convince us that
the mass destruction of civilian lives were either not happening (literal denial) or
were accidental (denial of responsibility).
But Norris is now appalled by the precious nonsense to which the fashionable
tracks of post modernism have led. What disturbs him is how seriously these ideas
were taken, "... to the point where Baudrillard can deliver his ludicrous theses on
the Gulf War without fear of subsequent exposure as a charlatan or of finding these
theses resoundingly disconfirmed by the course of real-world events". (Norris, p 17)
It is beyond my scope and competence to consider Norris's explanation for how
these ideas emerged and just where they lost their plausibility. He places particular
importance on the curious ascendancy of literary theory as a paradigm for other
areas of study. There is the bland assumption that because every text involves some
kind of narrative interest, therefore there is no way to distinguish factual, historical
or documentary material on the one hand from fictive, imaginary or simulated
material on the other. With no possible access to truth or historical record, we are
asked, Norris shows, to inhabit a realm of unanchored persuasive utterances where
 HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF THE STATE: THE CULTURE OF DENIAL 113

rhetoric goes all the way down and where nothing could count as an argument
against what the media or governments would have us currently believe.
This re-definition of history finds strange echoes, as Norris notes, among the right
wing revisionist historians of the holocaust, "... those for whom it clearly comes as
good news that past event can only be interpreted according to present consensus
values, or ideas of what currently and contingently counts as 'good in the way of
belief" (Norris, p 21). In the case of current events, like the Gulf War, we are left
with no resources to deal with the obvious contradictions between official
propaganda and personal witness (for example, about the bombing of the Amiriyah
civilian air raid shelter). The cult following of these ideas by some intellectuals
reflects, as Norris suggests, their lack of desire to make any political judgement, their
cynical acquiescence in the war. If the war was so unreal, so completely beyond our
competence to judge as informed observers, then we can say nothing to challenge
the official (media sponsored) version of events.
My point in raising this example is simple. If the Turkish government can deny
that the Armenian genocide happened; if revisionist historians and neo-Nazis deny
that the Holocaust took place; if powerful states all around the world today can
systematically deny the systematic violations of human rights they are carrying out -
then we know that we're in bad shape. But we're in even worse shape when the
intellectual avant garde invent a form of denial so profound, that serious people -
including progressives - will have to debate whether the Gulf War actually took
place or not.

(2) Acknowledgement
I promised a more optimistic second footnote. This is not to cheer you up, but just to
be honest. Denial has it opposites. What has to be understood are the conditions
under which denial does not occur, in which the truth (even if this concept is
disappearing down the post modern black hole) is acknowledged, not just its
existence but its moral implications.
After all, in the Milgram experiment, somewhere around 30% of the subjects
(depending on the conditions) did not push the button. In Kelman and Hamilton's
public opinion surveys, again another 30% would not obey orders to shoot innocent
women and children. In the middle of even the most grotesque of state crimes, such
as genocide, there are extraordinary tales of courage, rescuing and resistance. Acts
of altruism, compassion and pro-social behaviour are woven into the social fabric.
Above all, there is the whole human rights movement itself, which over the last three
decades has mobilised an extraordinary number of people into wholly selfless
behaviour to alleviate the suffering of others - whether by giving money, writing to
a prisoner of conscience or joining a campaign.
In my initial interviews with human rights organisations, I was surprised to hear a
sense of optimism. Yes, there are some people (referred to in the trade as the
"ostriches") who do not want to know. But most organisations were certain that their
potential pool has not been reached. I mentioned to one of my interviewees the
cynical notion of "compassion fatigue" - that people are just too tired to respond,
they can't bear seeing any more pictures of the homeless in the streets, victims of
AIDS, children starving in Somalia, refugees in Bosnia. Her response was that the
concept was a journalistic invention; what there is, is media fatigue.
This is where we return to the state of hyper-reality which post modernist theories
have so well exposed. The question is right open: Will the type of manipulation and
114 STANLEY COHEN (1993) 26 ANZJ Crim

simulation seen in the Gulf War dominate, creating indeed a culture of denial? Or
can we conceive of a flow of information which will allow people to acknowledge
reality and act accordingly?
This might seem a pretentious question for us humble criminologists to consider,
but I hope that you will allow me to get away with it.

NOTES
1 I have examined elsewhere the move in alternative criminology from "idealism" to
"realism", see Cohen (1988; 1990).
2 On the issues in bringing torturers to justice after the regime changes in Brazil and
Uruguay, see Weschler (1990).
3 On rape and sexual abuse in custody, see Amnesty International reports in 1992, especially
on India, Turkey, Philippines, Guatamala and Uganda.
4 For a nuanced historical reconstruction of the perceptions of villagers living next to the
Mauthausen concentration camp complex, see Horwitz, 1992.
5 My minor personal involvement in this debate - as the object of a radical post-modern
critique for foolishly using objective standards of knowledge (in a report on torture in
Israel) - is recorded in Cohen (1991).

REFERENCES
Barak, Gregg, (ed) (1991) Crimes By the Capitalist State: An Introduction to State Criminality,
State University of New York Press, Albany.
Baudrillard, Jean (1991, a) "The Reality Gulf' The Guardian, 11 January.
- (1991,b) "La guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu" Liberation, 29 March.
Braithwaite, John and Fisse, Brent (1990) "On the Plausibility of Corporate Crime Theory",
in W. Laufer and F. Adler (eds) Advances in Criminological Theory, Vol II, Transaction,
New Brunswick. .
Cohen, Stanley (1988) Against Criminology, Transaction, New Brunswick.
- (1990) "Intellectual Scepticism and Political Commitment: The Case of Radical
Criminology", Bonger Memorial Lecture, University of Amsterdam.
- (1991) "Talking About Torture in Israel" Tikkun, Vol 6, No 6 pp 23-30, 89-90.
Edelstein, E L et al (eds) (1989) Denial: A Clarification of Concepts and Research, Plenum
Press, New York.
Goleman, Daniel (1985) Vital Lies, Simple Truths: On the Psychology of Self Deception, Simon
and Schuster, New York.
Horwitz, Gordon (1992) In the Shadow ofDeath: Living Outside the Gates ofMauthausen, Free
Press, New York.
Hovanissian, Richard G (ed) (1986) The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, Transaction, New
Brunswick.
Journal of Social Issues (1990) Special Issue on "Moral Exclusion", Vol 46.
Karmen, A (1990) Crime Victims:An Introduction to Victimology, Brooks Cole, California.
Kelman, Herbert C and Hamilton, V Lee (1989) Crimes of Obedience, Yale University Press,
New Haven.
Kuper, Leo (1981) Genocide, Penguin Books, London,
Maran, Rita (1989) Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French-Algerian War, Praeger, New
York.
Muller, Ingo (1991) Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, Harvard University Press,
Cambridge.
Norris, Christopher (1992) Uncritical Theory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War,
Lawrence and Wishart, London.
Oliner, Samuel and Oliner, Pearl (1988) The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi
Europe, Free Press, New York.
 HUMAN RIGHTS AND CRIMES OF THE STATE: THE CULTURE OF DENIAL 115

Schwendinger, Herman and Schwendinger, Julia (1970) "Defenders of Order or Guardians of

Human Rights" Issues in Criminology, Vol 7, pp 72-81.
Sheleff, Leon (1978) The Bystander, Lexington.
Social Justice (1989) Issue on "Human Rights and People's Rights", Vol 16.
Steiner, John (1985) "Turning a Blind Eye: The Cover Up for Oedipus" International Review
ofPsycho-Analysis, Vol 12, pp 161-72.
- (1990) "The Retreat from Truth to Omnipotence in Sophocles" Oedipus at Colonus,
International Review ofPsycho-Analysis, Vol 17, pp 227-37.
Sykes, Gresham. and Matza, David (1957) "Techniques of Neutralization: A Theory of
Delinquency" American Sociological Review, Vol 22, pp 664-70.
Von Hirsch, Andrew and Jareborg, Nils (1991) "Gauging Criminal Harm: A Living-Standard
Analysis", Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol II No 1 pp 1-38.
Weschler, Lawrence (1990) A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers, Penguin
Books, New York.