Is Genocide Immoral? A secular reply
The question as a title is obviously an eye-catcher and, possibly, a potentially offensive one. And, yet, in the course of an intense conversation (a near altercation) the question was posed, in part as challenge and in part as trap. The interlocutor wanted to elicit a simplistic personal confession of moral values — "Yes, genocide is evil because . . ." And there's the rub. "Why is it?" — He also hoped to establish a framework of discourse that permitted but one tautological, politically correct response, namely, "Genocide is absolutely wrong, genocide is evil." To suggest unequivocally that it is not would have been to volunteer oneself on the side arguing that genocide may not be all wrong all the time. And who wants to converse with someone holding such a view, however, hypothetically? That kind of bully-tactics, of course, leads to an intellectual and logical cul-de-sac. Posed in this manner, the question is designed to stop discourse in its tracks. It imposes an impossible "either-or" and leaves no room for a rephrasing of the query. By answering, one is either on the side of the angels — genocide is unambiguously and unconditionally intolerable — or on that of the devil — genocide is not necessarily per se beyond the limits of condonable human behavior.
And yet, to pose the question is to raise a more basic one: If genocide goes beyond moral parameters, then according to whose standards? Is there a set of universal moral principles to which all humanity can and does subscribe automatically or instinctively? Or will efforts at locating unanimously approved limits that exclude genocide necessarily lead to a battle royal over whose culture-laden criteria will prevail? Already there is deep division internationally over whether human rights, once thought to be universal, are equally valid in different cultures. Similarly, United Nations agencies have had to deal with conflicting conceptions of the principle of freedom of communication and of whether women's issues are synonymous with human rights or a separate category of social values, varying from one culture to another. Should agreement on genocide's evil be any easier in today's strife-torn, value-conflicting international arena?
To pursue the condemnation of genocide via the path of metaphysical and theological morality — to brand it morally unacceptable — is to open a Pandora's Box, unleashing an irresolvable debate over which values to adopt. The consequences of taking that path is to venture into treacherous territory. Thus, for example, the theology of various religions will offer little definitive guidance as to the rejection of genocide except by tortuous bending of dogma and doctrine. The Jewish Tanakh is full of examples of ethnic cleansing while the Christian New Testament is replete with extreme expressions of intolerance for the despised "other." No neat moral boundaries in either text. Nor does the Kuran provide little consolation for those searching for the restraint of violence against groups. Neither Buddhism with its political fatalism nor Hinduism with its social insensitivity and disinterest are much help in providing an ironclad, anti-genocide doctrine; and Shintoism with its martial dimension even less so.
One must conclude, therefore, that morally, in the technical sense of the word, using values derived from a deity via revelation or mystical intuition, it is next to impossible to find a universally acceptable theological formula of behavior for the rejection of genocide en toto. It is, in fact, a futile exercise, leading to interminable bickering over theological and semantic fine points, a nightmare of circular Talmudic, Sophist, Thomistic, and/or Shaarite distractions on the level of that all too famous scene in Miracle on 34th Street in which a civic court recognized the existence of Santa Claus on the basis of the indisputable secular authority of the United States Post Office, which accepted mail addressed to him. It is a clever tour de force, farcical yet strangely didactic and canonically appropriate in this context.
Genocide needs to be divorced from purely moral consideration and placed, instead, squarely into the legal arena. It must, in all its forms, be classified exclusively as a crime, with those who commit genocide recognized first and foremost as criminals, as genocidists, and not as sinners. The former is a concrete legal term, the latter a foggy emotive word of little use to anyone seeking to bring order to society. Genocide needs to be kept within the secular so that its practitioners can be held fully accountable in this life. Genocide and genocidists belong unquestionably in a court of law, to be identified, tried, convicted, and punished for having violated the rules of the here and now. What the gods in this case think and do is of no concern to mortal beings. Society will be little served if genocide and its practitioners are dealt with in theologically based moral terms. Demonizing the deed and the doers cannot but encourage the very mentality of the genocidists who initially justified their criminal act of genocide by ascribing to their victims exaggerated satanic qualities. That was precisely what Hannah Arendt argued in her assessment of Eichmann as an ordinary human but absolutely culpable criminal.
Genocide, to be comprehensible, must first be confined to the legal dimension. Those who openly think genocide and those who embark on genocide must be dealt with within the narrow framework of the secular law condemning it and accusing them. Activities in genocidal speech and deed must be classified breaches of the social order, not of morality, and, therefore, subject to judicial treatment. Lawyers, not philosophers and theologians, must determine guilt in the name of the laws of mankind. Genocide is no violation of a metaphysical order but of secular society precisely because it is the ultimate anti-social act.
But doesn't law, to be just and humane, ultimately rest on morality? The question is reminiscent of the original one illustrated in this essay's title. It demands a simplistic "yes" as an answer, and automatically infers that the negative, the "no," is a wrong reply. It is essentially a rhetorical query inferring an obvious answer In fact, the correct answer is a mixed one: "Not necessarily!" The immediate retort should be a hedged skeptical affirmation followed by a question: "Perhaps; but which morality? That of mankind or that of the gods?"
The status of criminality ought to be enough to cope with the immorality, i.e. the inhumane lawlessness, of genocide and its handmaidens, the genocidists. It is enough that the international community condemn genocide as an immediate threat to all societies without reference to disputable moral criteria. Genocide as a plan and act falls within the orbit of crime, no matter what its meta-criminal implications. Theologians have every right to grapple with genocide in as much as it violates respective traditional metaphysical faiths and assumptions that good and evil have divine origins. But because they lack the capacity to provide a unanimous, unambiguous, all-embracing moral consensus they cannot supply the framework for a legal condemnation. Genocide as policy and act is criminal because the law so deems it; whether it is immoral, a clear violation of specific ethical teachings stemming from theological doctrine, is almost irrelevant.
More to the point, to engage in this kind of moralistic, judgmental rejection of genocide according to narrow cultural moral systems is to embrace a form of value-parochialism, precisely the kind of moral arrogance that is the hallmark of the genocidists who are convinced of the absolute moral rectitude of their campaigns of extermination against a segment of humanity they have deemed expendable. This moral totalism has allowed them to think and act criminally with absolute moral conviction of their rectitude, an ultra-egotistic stance that can only be effectively restrained by the force of law and not by a counter-demonization of the genocidists.
Behind genocide lurks the arrogance of power, unrestrained power unleashed on the powerless; opponents of genocide should eschew the same arrogance in their own opposition. Let moralists beware: les extrêmes se touchent. Radical anti-genocidalism can easily lead to condonable genocide, legitimated by the principle of self-defense on the part of one group against another.
Henry R. Huttenbach
Theologizing the Holocaust: On Mystifying History
The initial shock of the mass slaughter of millions of Jews literally left both survivor and observer speechless. Understandably, words at first seemed to fail to convey the reality of the Holocaust kingdom; but that did not mean that words were inherently inadequate. Ultimately the right expression can always be found to give voice to experience, no matter how difficult the challenge. Indeed, the miracle of language is precisely that it can, in the right hands, provide a vehicle for communicating both extreme thought and emotion, whether imaginary or actual.
Unfortunately, throughout the decades since the survivors of the Final Solution stepped out of the camps into the world of the living, all too many minds have surrendered to the false notion that the range of human language is inadequate to encompass the ultra-realities of the Holocaust. This intellectual capitulation has its antecedents at moments when the temptation to give in to the notion that experience is trans-articulate overcame the more timid minds. Luckily in moments of crisis the more timorous came to the rescue and crafted eloquent utterances to the seemingly inexpressible. Otherwise we would have no Shakespeare, no Milton, no Goethe, and certainly no Dante. Each of them plumbed the depths of the soul and reached for the heights of language and, through their genius, made language the vehicle with which to transport their readers into other times and places, thereby expanding otherwise quotidian horizons. The Greeks gave this a name, catharsis.
The same principle of the sufficiency of language holds true for the Holocaust, though it does not help when one of its most ardent verbalists, Elie Wiesel, insists, (as in his latest work, his memoir, All Rivers Run into the Sea) that the non-survivors must remain permanent outsiders due to the limitations of language: in the case of Auschwitz, he writes, "words that seek to grasp its reality are doomed to fail from the start." That, perhaps, is a personal confession, the frustration of any artist, but it is philosophically false if taken at face value. Humans, after all, are endowed with the infinite power of vicarious imagination, through which new worlds are opened to them thanks to the miracle of the word.
The consequence of catering to this negative attitude towards being able to verbalize fully the Holocaust has been a compensatory tendency to mystify it, to cloak it in pseudo-religious terminology, thereby lending it an aura of meta-history, of its having a trans-human reality, of being an event of supra-human significance. Thus, Holocaust literature is all too often filled with terms suggestive of a religious dimension in lieu of a strictly secularist exposition of a genocide. Said plainly: it is a bogus vocabulary which hints at non-existent layers of truth, thereby transporting the reader from the historic to the fictitious.
For example, beginning with the earliest works, life in the ghettos and camps was dramatically described as "hell"; in time, Hell and Auschwitz became synonymous. Little critical regard was given to the fact that, theologically, the Death Camps had nothing to do with the Hell, for example, of Christian tradition. Nevertheless, the "hell" label has stuck and the consequences are still with us. Auschwitz "became" a place abandoned by G-d, a Kingdom of Satan, in which inhumanity to man was practiced with demoniacal precision to the nth degree. The SS and their assistants, robbed of their humanity, are verbally transformed into citizens of a Dantesque twentieth century Inferno, veritable agents of Satan. With each hell-related word, the earthly Auschwitz was robbed of its criminal, genocidal reality.
Then there was the semi-theological appellation attached to the victims: they became "martyrs," though of what virtuous cause or noble principle remains unclear. The inappropriateness of martyrdom to death at the hands of genocidists is rarely admitted. Which martyrs did they resemble? The Christians martyrs of Roman times? The Saints who suffered bravely in the Coliseum, never denouncing their faith? The Jews who preferred death to conversion during the Crusades? Yet Jews under the Nazis were not given the choice: "Renounce Judaism and you may live!" Those who claim Jews died for the ideal Kiddush Hashem merely, poignantly camouflage the cold truth: in the camps, Jews were murdered, regardless of whether they were believers or atheists. No one asked them to defame the Holy name of G-d. It is a non-issue. Nor was what transpired in Auschwitz a latter-day struggle of the Maccabees, a battle about cultural survival. It was about raw human existence, with no metaphysical context, none at all, neither for the killers nor for the killed. It was about racial extermination (of the Jews) and racial survival (of the "Aryans").
In other areas, too, the terminology of religion and the insinuations of a theological dimension are in abundance. The central or overall "meaning" of the Holocaust, beyond the spatial and temporal, is more often than not relegated to the sphere of the "unfathomable," as if only a divine eye could see "into" the event, whose significance, it is implied, lies beyond mere human comprehension. This adds a note of perpetual mystery to the Holocaust, bestowing on it a transcendental quality, a kind of spiritual fourth dimension, as if it were part of a cosmic drama, a struggle between pure evil and pure good.
In such a context, it becomes almost reflexive to speak in terms of the "sacred" memory of the "martyred" victims. Such designations trigger off a sense of inescapable moral responsibility towards the dead. Couched in Jewish traditional terms, remembrance is transformed into G-d willed exhortation, as one prominent philosopher suggested, for an "11th Commandment, not to forget!" Thus, to remember the Holocaust is to perform a mitzvah; not to would be an act of omission, tantamount to breaching Halachah.
This theologizing of an historic event is, no doubt, symptomatic of the collective trauma the Final Solution inflicted upon subsequent Jewish generations. Nevertheless, it is poor history and ought to be discouraged by social science teachers and scholars alike. As a rhetorical device in public utterances, these expressions are understandable and still have their place. People will need to mourn; and as an act of expressing profound sorrow, resorting to such vocabulary qua rhetoric is appropriate as long as it is in good taste and stops short of purple prose. Yet, professionally, academically, this language must be eschewed, circumscribed, and gently but firmly discouraged by editors and authors alike.
Words after all do have their independent powers. Though "Hell" was initially used metaphorically or emphatically as a substitute, perhaps, for "nightmare," i.e. fearsome, the original meaning of hell persisted, and, in the long run, imposed itself in its literal — in its theological — guise. The same dynamic is evident in the use of "martyr," initially used as a convenient synonym for "innocent." The actual concept of martyrdom, however, has prevailed and the truly "innocent" were metamorphosed into victims of an entirely different tragedy that the Holocaust was not.
In short, theologizing the Holocaust distorts its historic identity. The terminology serves more the purposes and/or agendas of those who feel compelled to go beyond the secular realm. Theological vocabulary reflects the eschatological, tautological and moral orientation, the political views, or even the personal needs of respective speakers or writers. Superimposing a layer of false mystery is not only deceptive (itself a breach of ethics, because it is anti-intellectual), but it is primarily bogus mystification, a form of obfuscation that distracts from the historicity of the Holocaust.
Henry R. Huttenbach