Today, the pardoning of the national Thanksgiving turkey is an annual White House staple, complete with TV crews capturing the live pageantry. But this pomp and circumstance surrounding the pardon masks the larger question: Why we are granting clemency or extending mercy to turkeys in the first place?

A pardon entails the waiving of a punishment and the restoring of one’s civil liberties, while a reprieve delays imposition of a sentence or punishment (often because the sentence or punishment is seen as unjust given the crime). Importantly, none of these actions erase the guilt of the person to whom it’s being granted. But turkeys cannot commit crimes. And so the purpose of the president pardoning a turkey (or two) right before Thanksgiving only serves to mask the realities faced by those particular turkeys, and for that matter, most turkeys in the U.S.

Commercially bred turkeys grow quickly and produce a lot of meat, especially breast meat. Their large breasts make natural mating difficult, so they are bred through artificial insemination, and their eggs are placed in an incubator to hatch. Neither the process of collecting semen nor the process of insemination is done gently. The chicks hatch in batches of 10,000.  They are usually debeaked, desnooded, detoed, and have their spurs trimmed so they won’t harm one another as they grow in barns crowded with 7,000 to 10,000 birds. They remain in light at all times to promote eating and growth, reaching their slaughter weight in three to four months.

The U.S. produces about 250 million such turkeys each year. One or two of them are “pardoned,” and are generally sent to an animal sanctuary to live out their lives. But those lives tend to be fairly short. These turkeys usually have to be kept on special diets (which may well leave them hungry most of the time) in order to slow their growth and prolong their lives. If they are allowed to eat normally, they will grow too large for their bones and legs. Given that they have been bred for maximum growth and early maturity, it is not clear that the “pardon” is in the interest of the turkeys. It seems to be about making humans feel better about themselves before they sit down to a Thanksgiving meal.

The Thanksgiving holiday is fraught with hypocrisy and outright brutality. The fate of turkeys in what is now the U.S. is to be a brutalized commercial product that symbolizes a meal of peace that masks the brutality of European settlement here and the genocidal policies that attempted, but did not succeed, in wiping Native people completely off the map. Turkeys are linked to this history; indigenous to the Americas and first domesticated by Native Americans, they played an important role as food and as a religious sacrifice for many Indigenous peoples. But European colonists overhunted wild turkeys and continuously pushed them off their native habitats. By 1930, only a few hundred thousand wild turkeys were left.

Colonists also took turkeys back to Europe—kept in narrow cages and often force fed—where they became a popular food item, particularly for the Christmas holiday. With continued European immigration to the U.S., turkeys became a common food bird here as well. The American meat industry began breeding and raising them in ways that ignored their naturally seasonal reproductive patterns, denied their natural patterns of eating and movement, and showed no respect for their social and inquisitive way of being.

At the same time that the annual numbers of commercially raised turkeys were moving from tens of millions (1940s) to hundreds of millions of birds (1960s), efforts to reintroduce turkeys to the “wild” also started to take hold. But this work was not done for the sake of the turkeys or to make amends for hunting them nearly to extinction. It was done, like many American wildlife restoration efforts, so that turkey hunting could once again be a popular and profitable activity.  Many wildlife restoration efforts in the U.S. owe their success to the fact that hunters wanted to hunt them. The 1937 Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act taxed hunting guns and ammunition to fund wildlife restoration efforts. For turkeys these reintroduction efforts were successful, and by 1950, there were about 500,000 “wild,” or more accurately, free-living turkeys in the U.S. By 1973, that number was estimated to be 1.5 million, and in 2005 it reached 7 million. Ironically, it was the ready supply of commercial turkey meat that allowed for the successful reintroduction of free-living turkeys. Since there was such a robust supply of commercially bred turkeys for the dinner table, for lunch meat, and for burgers, the hunting pressure could be removed from the free-living birds and allow them to recover.

While free-living turkeys spend up to five months with their mothers, learning a lot about where to find food and how not to be food for others, domesticated commercial turkeys never know their (or any) mother. They don’t range over territories, mate, brood, or find their own food. They end their very short lives by being tightly packed into crates and shipped to a slaughterhouse, where they are hung upside down while still alive. Most are slaughtered by being electrified, then having their throats slit, but if they are not the standard size, they may survive these measures. This results in live birds being dunked in scalding water before they are defeathered. Given that the turkeys have been living in their own excrement, the slaughter process often promotes the spread of disease. Turkey meat is regularly recalled due to salmonella and listeria contamination. The commercial production of turkeys has a detrimental impact on the environment and harms human health through the consumption of contaminated meat and through air and water pollution.

It seems that the human commercialization and mass consumption of turkeys is a crime that needs our attention, and not a pardon. The poultry industry is guilty of overusing antibiotics, creating toxic amounts of manure, polluting waterways and killing fish, polluting the air, and forcing a painful and unnatural life and death on hundreds of millions of turkeys each year in the U.S. alone. As we rethink the myths this country was built on, it’s a good time to reflect on the crimes we are all complicit in as well.

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The central insight is that a country can’t face up to its past alone. Germans needed help from Jews who came back to their hometowns after the war.

Spiegel, who was born in the nearby town of Versmold in 1905, belonged to a long line of cattle traders, a typical profession of rural German Jews into the 20th century. Well-liked and respected by both Jews and Christians in Warendorf and the countryside around it, he felt a part of the community, even with the intensification of antisemitism after the Nazis seized power in 1933. But the violence and destruction of Kristallnacht, in November 1938, convinced Spiegel that Jews had no home in Germany, and he and his family fled to Brussels.

When the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940, they discovered the family’s hiding place, caught Hugo, and deported him. (The Nazis also caught Hugo’s first child, Rosa. His wife Ruth and son Paul escaped and survived by hiding in a village in Belgium.) Miraculously, Hugo survived Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz—the infamous camp where the Nazis ultimately took the life of his daughter when she was just 11 years old.

There are many remarkable stories of survival. We read fewer accounts of those who survived the Holocaust and then came back to their local communities in Germany. The Spiegels, without Rosa, returned to Warendorf and rebuilt a life, with Hugo Spiegel starting his cattle trading business once again.

Hugo Spiegel as “Champion Shot” by Leonard Freed. From the series “German Jews Today”, Warendorf 1961 – 1962; Jewish Museum Berlin, Inv. no. 2006/198/3

It would be easy to tell the story of how Spiegel’s postwar Warendorf chose to shut its eyes to the events of the Nazi period, especially in the first decades after the war. Yet in my research about how small towns in Germany eventually confronted the recent past, I have found that there is another story too. It is one of begrudging cooperation, of gradual acceptance, and of Jews and Germans eventually working together to commemorate the past.

The road to cooperation was a difficult one. In Warendorf, not everyone was happy about the Spiegels’ return. Hugo Spiegel did not shy from noting who had been a malicious Nazi and who not—and he had to fight tenaciously for years for the simplest commemorative gestures.

In 1946, Spiegel proposed to erect a stone that listed the names of the Jews who had been buried in the local cemetery, which local Nazis had destroyed in November 1938. But after two years of wrangling, the proposal was turned back. In 1953, he suggested establishing a memorial stone to recall “the Warendorf members of the Jewish community who died in the concentration camps.” For reasons difficult to discern, it, too, was refused.

Then, in 1960, Spiegel tried again, and began working towards a memorial to both the Jews who lay in the Warendorf cemetery and those “who died in the years 1933 to 1945.” Warendorf finally accepted the proposal in 1968. Two years later, in November 1970, a quarter century after the end of the war but early for such commemorations generally, the town unveiled the new memorial, with the mayor and Hugo Spiegel assuming center stage at the ceremony.

There were not many Jews like the Spiegels who came back to make their homes in the very towns where locals had jeered and howled with approval when the Nazis destroyed and desecrated synagogues. The Spiegels certainly remembered how Hitler’s stormtroopers wrecked the small synagogue on Freckenhorster Street, tearing up prayer books and Torah rolls, and tossing them on the street.

Most of the more than 200,000 Jews still alive in Germany when the Nazi government capitulated in April 1945 were from Eastern Europe, and by 1950 the vast majority of them had left the displaced person camps for the United States, Israel, and other countries. Only around 25,000 Jews remained in West Germany, and 2,000 in the East. Most were German-speaking and chose to live in big cities, where anonymity guaranteed a quieter life. Fewer returned to their erstwhile small towns, and in the general vicinity of Warendorf they probably numbered not more than a few hundred.

Interestingly, a lot of them were cattle traders, with genuine ties to the rural world. They included Hermann Michel, who survived Theresienstadt, and came back to his native Burgsteinfurt, where he ensured that the synagogue was commemorated early on; and Hans Frankenthal, a survivor of Auschwitz, Dora-Mittelbau, and Theresienstadt, who returned to the town of Schmallenberg, only to encounter a much more recalcitrant community in which old Nazis quickly occupied key positions and confidently told returning Jews, “One has to forget.”

But if we go beyond these noteworthy if infrequent cases of genuine returnees, we see that many Jews came back to visit hometowns in order to honor deceased parents and grandparents who died (one wants to say fortunately) before the horrors of the Holocaust began. As air travel became affordable in the 1970s, their numbers increased. And their first stop was typically the local cemetery.

In 1933, there were still some 1,700 Jewish cemeteries in Germany. In the 12 years after their seizure of power, Nazis desecrated or destroyed at least 80 percent of them. But most were only partly destroyed. In the postwar era, Germany remained the home of over a thousand Jewish cemeteries, their cracked and broken stones overgrown with weeds and brush. Neo-Nazis, hooligans, and ill-tempered and inebriated teenagers knew of them, and perpetrated hundreds of desecrations between 1945 and 1999. They desecrated some Jewish cemeteries numerous times—the cemetery in the small village of Randegg near Lake Constance in 1945, 1966, 1970, and 1986, for example.

Yet it was precisely when returning Jews gathered the courage to complain about the state of the cemetery in their home town, or to ask why there was no plaque or sign stating what had occurred during Kristallnacht, that something began to move among local people. This was often the moment that the work of commemoration began.

The local movers and shakers who sought to recognize the past were of different ages and occupations. They were schoolteachers, archivists working in a tiny office in the town hall, women from the preservation society, retired mayors and their wives who had time on their hands, idealistic high school students, and people who knew the Jews or family members who had come back. Their politics are not easy to pin down. Not a few Bavarians who reached out to returning Jews supported the Christian Socialist Union, one of Germany’s most conservative parties.

I have used this map to track when these communities put up a sign near the cemetery that told of the fate of the local Jews during the Holocaust, or a plaque noting where a synagogue once stood. The timelines show activity in the late ’40s (right after the Holocaust), followed by silence in the ’50s, the beginnings of work in the ’60s, a slowdown in the early ’70s, an uptick in the second half of that decade, and a commemorative explosion, starting in the early ’80s, and continuing thereafter.

In the midst of this commemorative explosion, in 1987, Hugo Spiegel died, and was buried in the very Jewish cemetery he had spent so many years trying to reconstitute. Three years later, largely on the initiative of its private citizens, the town erected a memorial stone for the synagogue and for the “Jewish citizens expelled, taken away, and murdered.” Caught up in what was now Germany’s pervasive culture of remembrance, Warendorf also renamed the small side-street leading to the synagogue “Hugo-Spiegel-Strasse.”

Historians sometimes attribute the impetus for these acts of remembrance to the famous trials (especially the Eichmann and the Auschwitz trials of the early ’60s) and, later, to the mini-series “Holocaust”, which aired in West Germany in 1979. But I am skeptical. In my investigations, I rarely read of local activists—those school teachers, archivists, and retirees—who mention being inspired by the miniseries (though some invoke the trials). Instead, I often see another logic at work.

Especially in the ’60s and ’70s, the fortuitous occurrence of German-Jewish cooperation, in this or that town, often made the difference. Sometimes an organization was behind it—the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, for example. Sometimes, it was a Jewish émigré or survivor coming back, and striking up a conversation. The USC Shoah Archive, colloquially known as the Spielberg Archive, has many such stories of return (indexed as “post-conflict visits”), including testimonies of some German Jews who rejected such visits, and who simply could not fathom why others would want to go back and visit.

German-Jewish contacts increased in the ’80s and ’90s, as scores of towns and small cities began to stage so-called “visitor weeks.” Large cities, such as Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, and Hanover had been staging them since the ’60s, asking hundreds and hundreds of Jews to return. In the last two decades of the 20th century, many smaller places followed suite, and invited the surviving Jews, now living across the globe—from Buenos Aries to Pasadena, from Tel Aviv to Paris—back to their home towns in Germany. The towns also paid for the trips.

For a whole week Germans and Jews talked about what had occurred, what has happened since, how their kids were doing, and where to go shopping. Regional politicians, and sometimes even national ones, attended too. Typically, the mayor spoke, local notables offered their reflections, and writers read deeply felt poetry aloud. Visiting Jews also got up and gave speeches, usually offering words of reconciliation. As the town served coffee and cake, Germans and Jews who were once neighbors looked at old pictures, putting together the shards of what was once a genuine community. Photos and transcripts of the proceedings were published in the local newspaper, and sometimes reproduced, complete with lists of attendees, in small books.

If we can believe newspaper interviews and follow-up statements, most Jews were glad they went back to their German hometowns, just as the Germans in those towns were proud of the steps that their local communities had taken. Often after one town had its “visitor week,” other communities in the region soon followed, wishing not to be left behind. More teachers got involved, and more students—even the bored ones. Soon the very definition of Heimat, of home or hometown, changed. No longer was the history of town X or Hamlet Y thinkable without the Jews who once lived there, and the wrong that had been done to them.

By the ’80s and ’90s, there were also larger, national developments that pushed Germans to enter into their history more truthfully: country-wide essay contests on the subject of Germany and its past; the galvanizing effect of a president, Richard von Weizsäcker, whose measured, precise, and sensitive words helped a nation think more deeply about its own history; the constant drum of prominent politicians, publicists, philosophers, and historians reflecting on an “unmasterable past”; and another infamous anniversary in 1988, marking 50 years since the November Pogrom. Meanwhile, all manner of organizations, such as the History Workshop (Geschichtswerkstatt), had sprung up, urging communities to look more critically at their Nazi past.

When it’s finally written, a good history of how Germans faced their past will show the constant feedback between the local and the national. Actually, it will do more than that—for Germany’s past was hardly its own. The turn to an honest telling of the German past had long been a transnational undertaking, with foreign eyes observing it with keen interest for decades. In important respects, it was also a German-Jewish undertaking.

The story of Hugo Spiegel and his family is instructive. His son Paul did not follow his father into the business of cattle trading, but instead became a writer for the Jüdische Allgemeine, one of the most important Jewish newspapers in Germany. In 1993, Paul Spiegel would become a major figure in the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and in 2000 its president. In that year, he also helped found an organization against xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism: Gesicht Zeigen! Für ein weltoffenes Deutschland e. V.M The name translates as: “Show your Face: For a Germany Open to the World.” The people of Warendorf evidently approved. In 2001, the town publicly honored Paul Spiegel.

There are many lessons—local, national, and transnational—that we could learn from this German-Jewish story: the importance of community work, the necessity of reaching across divides, and the crucial role that local schoolteachers, archivists, retirees, hobby historians, and preservationists may well play in the great transformations of a nation’s memory.

After reading literally hundreds of accounts of towns from Bavaria and Baden in the south to Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein in the north, I am especially impressed by the patience of these local actors. For it is they who put in the many years of work that often went into convincing town councils to repair a cemetery, put up a plaque, restore a synagogue, rename a street for a famous Jewish son or daughter, or add a monument in the central square of a hometown that had once wronged its former citizens. In many cases, they would also be the first to admit that they had help, and that the work of memory was not a German effort alone.

Another lesson is that, while tearing down hurtful monuments has its time, the necessary if arduous road of putting up the right monuments—fixing the wording on plaques, bringing histories together, commemorating forgotten victims and unsung heroes—runs through communities, town after town. It is a long road, and in the United States, it is still ahead of us.

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UCLA historian Richard G. Hovannisian, whose parents survived the genocide of Armenians that started almost exactly 100 years ago, recalled how his parents’ generation never grappled with had happened to their families or why. “There was no analysis,” he said. That began to change in the 1960s, with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel for his role in the Holocaust and, in 1965, the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

But Jok Madut Jok, a historian born and raised in Sudan and co-founder of the Sudd Institute, said that the concept of genocide is still difficult for the world to wrap its head around—and thus address. Genocide “has gotten stuck in a very tight space between political activism on the one hand and scholarship” on the other, he said. And so it is caught between horror and fascination, war and criminalized massacre, emphasizing race and claiming shared humanity, political correctness and moral and legal obligations to act, he said. We continue to haggle over what is a genocide and what isn’t, said Jok. But at the heart of it is that a large number of people died for who they were.

Still, University of Wisconsin political scientist Scott Straus said that whether you’re looking at the long arc of the 20th century or just the last 20 years, “a lot of progress has been made” in terms of public awareness of genocide, and how national and international institutions address it. Genocide is “incredibly difficult” to stop, reduce, prevent—or rebuild from. Even if we can all agree that we should stop genocide on a moral and ethical basis, said Straus, we should appreciate what a challenge it is to do so.

Yet the word “genocide” itself remains freighted. Why, asked Raustiala, is the term so powerful, and what does it mean?

World Peace Foundation research director Bridget Conley-Zilkic said that the legal definition of genocide—which was crafted in 1948—requires the demonstration of the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. What’s difficult is that this usage means that to get a legal finding of genocide, you must “get inside the mindset of the perpetrator” and prove intent to destroy a group, not just to push a group out of a certain area or defeat an insurgency.

Barack Obama used the term “Armenian Genocide” while running for president but has not done so while in office, including in his recent address on the hundredth anniversary. Hovannisian said that Obama the candidate did not understand the kind of political and economic pressures he’d be subjected to from Turkey as president. But Hovannisian noted that France officially recognized the Armenian Genocide a few years ago; the Turkish government withdrew their ambassador and cut off economic ties—but only for six months.

But even if crimes aren’t labeled genocide, Jok pointed out, they are still crimes. The challenge is how to make it difficult for a group—whether it’s a state, a political party, or an ethnic group—to kill another group. He also said that one of the difficulties in identifying genocide lies in the fact that it “happens under the cover of war.” And the ongoing power struggles and fighting can make it difficult to get to the bottom of genocide during these conflicts. Perpetrators can defend themselves with the fact that war involves killing people. But Jok said that there is a distinction between killing armed men and women—which is war—and killing women and children, which is not.

Yet most wars do not include genocides or mass atrocities, said Conley-Zilkic. The challenge is to figure out how to identify those conflicts that do—and how, exactly, to intervene. She said that there is no question, for instance, that the Syrian government is responsible for ruthless brutal violence against civilians. But, should the U.S. intervene, what is the endgame there? Should the current regime be removed? What do we think would happen in the aftermath of regime change?

These are not easy questions, said Conley-Zilkic. But what is revolutionary is the priority placed on posing them—and that has achieved real results. The number of mass atrocities around the world has declined, as has the number of people being killed.

Straus agreed, noting policy intervention improvements such as the creation of the U.N. Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and a U.S. Atrocities Prevention Board. Awareness of genocide is much greater than ever before, he said; “a kind of conscience that didn’t really exist 25 years ago” is now in effect—one that leads to political will.

Hovannisian said that intervention remains a stumbling block. If done incorrectly, intervention can lead to a backlash and reaction that are worse than no intervention as all. European powers put pressure on the Turkish government to implement reforms in treatment of minority groups before the genocide began. But then Europe stepped away, only to add to the suspicion of Armenians as a threat. Hovannisian pointed to recent history of U.S. intervention in the Middle East as reason for governments to take care before knocking out one regime after another.

In the audience question-and-answer session, the panelists were asked why the U.S. government has failed to intervene over and over again, from Armenia to Bosnia.

Straus and Conley-Zilkic said that the kind of miscommunications that plagued the government as recently as the early 1990s—where letters between agencies and branchers were lost, and different government organizations claimed ignorance of atrocities being committed in Bosnia and other parts of the world—would not happen today because there is more collaboration than ever before.

But Straus said that while people know and care about genocide a great deal today, stopping it is an entirely different issue. The will to stop genocide exists; the ability to do so does not.

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Many cite the famous Edmund Burke quote—“the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” But what exactly can we do? First, let’s understand how the seeds of mass atrocities begin to take root.

In advance of the Zócalo/UCLA “Thinking L.A.” event, “Why Can’t We Stop Genocide?,” we asked scholars and authorities on genocide prevention: What are the legal, political, cultural, economic, and historical conditions that lead to genocide?

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The case is also an opportunity for Americans, who have generally failed to acknowledge our responsibilities for brutal Cold War-era repression in Central America, to reflect on a genocide in which the U.S. government was arguably complicit. Guatemala suffered one of the most brutal cases of government repression in the Western Hemisphere, a 34-year-long conflict whose goals were guided by U.S. foreign policy. The Guatemalan truth commission estimated that 200,000 people were killed, 50,000 of whom disappeared, while also concluding that the state committed genocide against the country’s indigenous peoples. Thousands of villages were razed, hundreds of massacres were committed, and torture, rape, and abuse were institutionalized through “scorched earth” policies that were most intense under Ríos Montt’s government.

While more than 90 percent of serious violations were committed by the state, Guatemalan courts have pursued only a handful of prosecutions. The case against Ríos Montt and co-defendant José Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, his former intelligence director (who was acquitted), represents both the first time the country has brought a case against high-ranking leaders and the first time it has indicted anyone for genocide.

The genocide charge, conviction, and subsequent annulment have polarized Guatemalan society. Many people, including representatives of indigenous groups and human rights advocates, see the case—which focused on specific abuses against the Ixil people, one of the country’s many indigenous groups—as the most significant challenge ever to Guatemala’s culture of impunity. It is both an official vindication of the value of decades of heroic struggles to document mass killings and a sign that society may finally be ready to address the criminal and moral responsibility for what is known in the country as “La Violencia.” Following the Constitutional Court’s annulment of the Rios Montt conviction, Guatemalan civil society instituted a nationwide campaign, “ ¡Sí hubo genocidio!”—“Yes, there was genocide!”

For those on the right—conservative politicians, retired military personnel, and the business elite—the court’s judgment is understood as a profound miscarriage of justice, the result of outside manipulation or pandering to the international community. Among these critics is Guatemala’s current president, himself a former general, who has denied that genocide was committed. “When I say that here in Guatemala there is no genocide, I say it from my experiences,” he said in an interview with CNN after the Ríos Montt ruling, referring to his deployment as an officer in the same region and at the same time reviewed by the court, and perhaps revealing a fear that the conviction of the former head of state might lead to further prosecutions against other former military leaders.

There are few legal concepts that carry the weight and power of the term genocide. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the subject has called it “the ultimate crime and the gravest violation of human rights it is possible to commit.” The Genocide Convention, created in the wake of the devastation of World War II, was the first international human rights treaty of the postwar era. It entered into force in 1951, a full quarter century before the major conventions that define the foundation of international human rights law, and has been ratified by more than 140 states (including the United States, which has a generally poor record of accepting human rights treaties). Yet it is only in the last two decades—with the creation of various new courts such as the ad-hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court, and the Iraq High Tribunal—that the commitments enshrined in the genocide convention have been put to practical use. The first international genocide conviction was not until 1998, a half-century after the convention was drafted, and the Ríos Montt case represents one of only a handful of genocide prosecutions.

The crime of genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such” through one or more of five destructive acts. This definition is remarkably consistent throughout the world, with the language copied word for word in the various domestic and international bodies where it is used. But despite the widespread acceptance of the definition, each element presents intricate interpretive and evidentiary issues, and the infrequency with which the charge has been brought means that many ambiguities remain unresolved. How does one understand the meaning of “intent” and then prove that “intent” existed in a particular case? What level of violence is required to meet the definition of the destruction of a group “in part”? What sort of targeting must occur for the group to be identified “as such”? What proof is necessary for determining the existence of “a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,” and how is membership in this group defined?

The evolving jurisprudence on genocide may provide guidance on these questions, but existing court decisions in one system have no necessary authority for cases processed in a different system. More significantly, the legal proof for a case of genocide often conflicts with popular, morally motivated understandings of the term. For example, the plain language of the Convention allows an individual to be found guilty of genocide without the death of a single individual if there is a clear policy of “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Conversely, look to the case of Cambodia, popularly referenced as one of the most significant cases of genocide since the Holocaust, in which as many as 2 million people died under the terror of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. However, these mass killings, horrific as they clearly are, may not meet the definition of genocide because the vast majority of victims were from the same national, ethnic, and religious group as the perpetrators, but were targeted for political reasons. This has created a surprising outcome in current trials in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, where charges of genocide only apply to specific subgroups of the vast victim population—the Cham, an ethnic minority, and Vietnamese, a national group, rather than applying the crime to the brutal mass slaughter of millions—formalizing a stark division between the specific legal application of the term and the popular understanding of its descriptive power.

The debate over the Ríos Montt case also highlights the tensions between genocide’s status as a complex crime whose meaning in practice is steadily evolving and its longstanding status as the most significant mode of moral condemnation for atrocities. Those who deny the genocide claim against General Ríos Montt assert that government repression, severe as it may have been, was part of a legitimate counter-insurgency effort where the lines between civilians and combatants were blurred. They argue that the state’s intent was not to target the Ixil people for destruction but to stamp out a leftist insurgency rooted in the countryside and in areas with high concentrations of indigenous people. Those supporting the genocide claim draw attention to the targeted assassination of indigenous leaders, mass resettlement programs, and the identification of the Ixil, in general, as enemies of the state. They point to the killing of thousands of unarmed indigenous villagers—coupled with systematic rape and torture and the targeting of women, children, infants, and the elderly—and assert that such actions define the state as responsible for genocide.

As heated, threatening, and potentially dangerous as discussion over these issues may be, the Ríos Montt conviction has forced Guatemala to confront its past in a way that no other action has done, not even the 1999 truth commission report that made similar claims. And herein lies the complex power of the term genocide: Its profound condemnatory nature through specific prosecutions demands a response and requires an engagement with the substance of the claim in a way that is unique among serious crimes.

Only a few years ago, defenders of the military’s action during the country’s civil war routinely denied that massacres, disappearances, torture, rape, and other human rights violations were ever committed by the state. Yet now, confronted with the public airing of detailed records of violence committed under the Ríos Montt regime, there are few critics left who dispute some level of official responsibility for brutal atrocities. Even those denying the genocide charge have barely criticized Ríos Montt’s conviction for “crimes against humanity,” which refers to severe acts of violence committed in a widespread and systematic manner and was one of the core crimes developed in the Nuremburg prosecutions against high-ranking Nazi leaders.

The ongoing legal procedures in the Ríos Montt case, from the recent annulment of the judgment to whatever comes next, is part of a process in Guatemala and around the world through which we are all learning about the meaning of genocide. This involves finding a balance between the specificity of the term’s technical application and its broad social and moral authority, with an understanding that both are core elements of what genocide is and must be.

Regardless of whether the conviction is sustained (or whether Ríos Montt, who is 86, passes away before the process reaches completion), two irreversible feats have been accomplished by this case. The Guatemalan leader was convicted of genocide by a legitimate court respecting due process protections. And, by focusing on the core issue at stake—genocide—the case has forced Guatemalan society to reckon more seriously with its brutal, tragic history, opening the space for a debate has served the goals of truth and accountability.

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