The Genocide Forum
Table of Contents
- J' ACCUSE! An Open Letter
Remembering the Past: Forgetting the Present - Speaking of Early Warnings: Focus on Tibet
- Crying "Wolf !" : Making False Analogies
- Does Germany Need a Holocaust Museum?
- Whose "Mein Kampf"is it? To Censure or Not
March 1, 1997
J'accuse! An Open Letter
Remembering the Past: Forgetting the Present.
The 27th Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches meets in the warm March days of Tampa, Florida. It is a festive occasion, marking yet another year of work to refresh the memory of dark times, to encourage education against evil deeds, and to warn today's and tomorrow's generations to avoid the pitfalls of yesteryear. For three days, participants will be saturated with panels and keynote speeches on sundry aspects of the Holocaust. A glance at the program shows all the appropriate rubrics: Christian Leadership, Children of Survivors, Women, Literature, Deniers, Theology, Film, Psychology, Rescue, even Goldhagen, and, of course, Ethics. Is this not laudable? What could possibly be missing? Is something wrong?
At the very end of the Conference, a single panel on "Other Genocides" is appended, as if the topic were an afterthought, a gesture of tokenism. It is there as if not to disturb the atmosphere of total devotion to the Holocaust. Yet it gives rise to the question "Why Study the Holocaust at all, if not to deter genocide in the Future?" Was not the Conference founded in 1970 precisely to help guarantee against the return of a similar evil? At least to quicken the Christian conscience? And what has happened? A quarter of a century later, our collective intellectual attention is so riveted on the past and so enmeshed with the non-existent future as we search for "Early Warning Signals" that no eyes are on the present.
That present is in the form of the genocidal inter-ethnic war between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda/Burundi/ Zaire. Daily reports provide detailed accounts of each murderous event, accurate figures of the dead, and disturbing anecdotes about the roles of priests, of the Church hierarchy and of the Vatican itself. The flood of photographs speaks for itself. We know about the slaughter and the continuing slaughter. Right at this moment we know, even as we meet in comfort, eat luxuriously, discuss and debate heatedly, and generally live content with our commitment to grappling with the perplexing events of the European crisis half a century ago. We do so even as hundreds of thousands are killed for their ethnicity in the heart of Africa, whose sufferings of imminent extermination merit but a passing glance at the tail-end of our gathering. What does this mean?
Have we lost our moral direction? Have we up-ended our priorities? Are we about to plan next years' gathering without giving this contemporary genocidal tragedy even a passing nod? It reminds one of a Kafkaesque setting, a banquet festivity inside as the Angel of Death rides outside. Let those who attended take note of the motto of two international events held in Oxford and Berlin: "Remembering for the Future." Instead we seem to be remembering for the sake of the past, for the sake of remembering, itself a form of amnesia.
"J'accuse!" is a harsh title. It is meant to jar, as did Emile Zola a century ago. While guilty France was celebrating, the innocent Captain Dreyfuss was rotting in prison on Devil's Island. Let this then serve as an appeal that we, entrusted with the legacy of moral purpose emanating from the still-warm ashes of Auschwitz, open our eyes and hearts to the genocide of this day, of today. Let us give purpose to our years of study by directing our energies towards the evil of the present, inspired by the evil of the past, before we find ourselves waking up when it will be too late. Only this time there will be no excuse for not having known. Let it not be said of us that we failed because of a myopic Holocaust fixation.
Afterword (April 15, 1997)
At the time this statement was conceived, close to 300,000 Hutu refugees were still alive in Zaire. Since then, at the time of writing, their numbers have dwindled to less than 100,000. These are the ones who managed to cross the Congo River; the remainder is either dead from starvation, illness and exhaustion, or they are still wandering through the forests, bereft of assistance. By the time this issue of The Genocide Forum reaches the reader in May, the bulk of the Hutu refugees will be dead without much public outcry or more from those studying the Holocaust. The dead refugees will have become history and we, the passive spectators, will be branded Bystanders. This truly is history as irony.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
Speaking of Early Warnings: Focus on Tibet
In a recent separately distributed Forum article, "J'accuse!", (preceding this essay in slightly reworded form) the Holocaust community of scholars was taken to task for having failed miserably professionally and morally in paying attention to the tragic existential crisis of over a quarter million Hutu refugees slowly dying in the forests of east Zaire, twin victims of a vengeful advancing Tutsi-led army from Rwanda and of a pro-Tutsi rebel force engaged in a war of secession in Zaire. The accusation of neglect sounded especially forceful in light of repeated warnings since 1972 that a pre-genocidal and actual genocidal Hutu-Tutsi crisis was in the making.
Why were these earlier signals ignored? Or why were they misinterpreted? Was it callousness or carelessness that has led to the present myopia in the Holocaust scholarly community not to place this ethno-genocide in the heart of central Africa high on its list of priorities?
The same questions could be asked with reference to the plight of Tibetans since their country's occupation by and incorporation into the People's Republic of China forty years ago. While the genocidal experience of the people of Tibet is seemingly different from those of the Tutsis and Hutus, the accumulating evidence clear, early-warning signs since the mid-50s is the same. Once again, this information has been largely ignored by those engaged in Holocaust Studies for the explicit purpose of letting awareness of the past nourish sensitivity for potential and actual genocide in the present. No conference, no panel, no prominent Holocaust scholar has placed the tragedy in Tibet center-stage and persistently insisted it be given high priority. The silence is indeed indicative of an intellectual myopia integral to the profession that set out to insure that by devoting attention to evil in the past it could assure less evil in the future.
In the case of Tibet, the genocidal future has been the present for over forty years. In at least two categories of Communist policy have the Chinese authorities violated the spirit and letter of the 1949 UN Genocide Convention:
1. Culturecide: For four decades, the Chinese leadership has condoned a systematic dismantling of Tibetan Buddhist society. In the name of Marxist atheism, virtually all the Lamaseries (monasteries) have been closed. Entire ancient libraries have been confiscated or destroyed. In the name of Marxist class-struggle, tens of thousands of Tibetan monks were either killed, imprisoned or forced to take up menial labor and denied the practice of their religion. Since the 1950s with individual exceptions, no new generation of apprentice monks has been allowed to perpetuate Tibetan religious traditions in prayer, ritual, art and literature. Were it not for the few tenacious Tibetan monks in exile along with their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, Tibetan culture would now be near-extinct as a result of violent Chinese suppression.
2. Ethno-Demographic Politics: In the last four decades, Tibetans have become a minority in their own land. Year after year, Beijing has encouraged wide-scale settlement of Han (Chinese) people. At first this was done via the army, whose occupation forces became permanent settlers with their families. Then economic policy was used to lure hundreds of thousands of Chinese workers to work in new factories purposely located in Tibet as a way of tipping the ethno-demographic balance in favor of a Han majority.
This process is continuing today and is helping to further erode the ethno-Tibetan presence. For one thing, the Chinese language is beginning to crowd out Tibetan. Social mobility is predicated on a thorough mastery of Chinese at the expense of Tibetan, which by now has become less a national language and more of a private means of communication no longer supported by the state.
As the ethno-demographic balance shifts in favor of the Han, other population dynamics take shape at the expense of the declining Tibetan minority. Two factors are causing this process to accelerate. One is growing inter-marriage, of Tibetan women to Han men, whose children automatically are exposed to Chinese culture only.. A second is the Chinese policy of one-child families, even though some leniency is shown to minorities (in practice mostly towards the Muslims the Uygurs in particular). In fact, because of economic restraints, (Tibetans are significantly poorer than Chinese), Tibetan families tend, on average, to have fewer than two babies, thus not sustaining present numbers. In fact, the replacement ratio is well below zero. At the present rate of shrinkage, the demographic future of Tibetans looks bleak. Culturecide in combination with a ruthless campaign to reduce the absolute number of Tibetans short of sterilization attempted once in the late '50s is visibly threatening the very existence of the Tibetan people as a distinct culture and ethnos.
And still the Holocaust genocide community looks away either willfully or seemingly unaware. How can one account for this? One can explain and forgive a blind eye once. But twice? Then the act of unknowing or the role of uncaring bystander becomes suspicious. There may be more than meets the eye; there may be a deep-seated prejudice at work muting the call for both a focus on Tibet, as well as an unsparing, critical look at the core moral problem now infecting the rank and file of students of the Holocaust.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
Crying "Wolf!" : Making False Analogies
For some time I have been asked to take note of the plight of Scientology in Germany . Like others I have looked with concern on the increasing tensions between scientologists and the German government. Most recently, I was formally approached to write in these pages on the growing public crisis, on how German authorities deal with the activities of the California-based sect with less and less patience and tolerance. (Its followers claim it to be a 'religion,' though from the publicity materials I receive it is hard to ascertain the validity of this self-identification; but that is not at issue here.)
To open these pages to the Germany-vs.-Scientology dispute is to acknowledge some association with the problems of genocide. This connection I fail to see. Nevertheless, a nation-wide, high-profile advertising campaign draws parallels between the German Federal Republic's treatment of scientologists and the Third Reich's murderous persecution of religious minorities. Such an approach is self-defeating: it is historically inaccurate, it is an egregious comparison that smacks of the very prevaricative propaganda employed by the Third Reich. There is, I believe, a serious need to convince readers that today's Germany has not the slightest resemblance to the previous one that ended in 1945. Yes, there is the on-going problem that the Church of Scientology has with the German government; but these disputes have not even the remotest connection with the crimes religious groups faced in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. To insist on doing so, is, in the long run, counter-productive.
The advertising campaign brings to mind the mid-1960s explosions of accusations of 'genocide' raised against Nigeria as it fought to suppress the Biafran secession movement. The pro-Biafran press and other sympathizers of the Ibo-led break-away movement sought to sway world opinion to its side. Coming in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day war which had aroused fears of Israel's eradication by Arab states, Western countries were ripe for such emotive appeals. The tactic was naked exploitation. Yet there was no genocide: true, many deaths as a result of the civil war, but no genocide, nothing close.
This false cry of "Wolf!" has weakened the overall readiness of the international community to recognize bona fide genocide-related events. Too often has the word been used as a propaganda ploy when it lacked substance. So once burned, as the cliché goes, the second time, right or wrong, no one listens. This was the tragic lesson at the beginning of this century: during World war I, Imperial Germany's armies were accused of committing monstrous atrocities against Belgium civilians; these proved to be false after the war, leaving many lower-ranking government official and young journalists in France and England red-faced for having been misinformed and manipulated by their superiors. A generation later, quite predictably, when the same officials (now older and wiser) heard reports of rea l German atrocities against Jews, they were extremely reluctant to give them credence.
In its misguided policy towards the Church of Scientology, the German government can be faulted for many sins. But it flies in the face of reason to link its shortsighted behavior to that of the Gestapo. The hysterical newspaper ads seem ludicrous to those of us who know better . They are an insult to common sense as they are to the religious martyrs, Jews and Christians, who died for their faiths at the hands of the Nazi genocidists.
I know neither how to resolve the unfortunate polarization between the two antagonists nor am I acquainted with the specifics of the conflict that pits the German state (the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Interior) against a tiny (c. 20,000) religious group (now backed by a State Department Human Rights report). There must be those with sufficient negotiating skills who can defuse this hyped war of extreme rhetoric voiced by both sides. For no cause is furthered by poisoning the atmosphere with ill-conceived insinuations of genocide, proto -genocide, or pre-genocide. Does anyone really believe that, in its gauche handling of the Scientologists the German Federal Republic is on a slippery slope towards Auschwitz? At the same time it does little good to speak of "Teutonic arrogance and insensitivity."
The pages of The Genocide Forum are reserved for concerns of real genocide. Our attention today ought to be on eastern Zaire, where the present vicious regional rebellion is, in part, an extension of the mutual exterminational war between Hutus and Tutsis based in Rwanda and Burundi. Yet the academic community remains symptomatically quiet: unaware? disinterested? too busy? Somehow, judging from the signatories, the schein crisis in Germany seems of greater urgency. Why?
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
Does Germany need a Holocaust Memorial?
For the past year, heated discussions have taken place in Germany over an appropriate Holocaust Memorial destined to be located in Berlin, the emerging post-Bonn capital of a West-cum-East Germany. (One hesitates to call it "united" given the non-democratic, unilateral, Kohl-driven annexation-like fusion of east to west.)
What will be gained by erecting a physical monument dead-center in Berlin? Will it help collective remembrance? Will it prevent future generations from taking similar genocidal steps? Will it infuse a greater sense of tolerance towards present and future minorities? Or will it be at first a solemn tourist attraction, then a curio, and, eventually, a silent, forgotten testimony to an event fewer and fewer recall in response to its dated end-of-the-20th-century symbolism? Can a structure really fulfill the goal of national remembrance over the decades? Or inevitably, with the passage of time, must it lose its vitality, however powerful its original impact on its contemporaries? Ought there not be a better way for Germany to resolve this problem?
Indeed, is there truly a need for such a structure to further national remembrance in Germany? It could be argued that the entire landscape of Germany is one monument to the Holocaust. From north to south, from Sachsenhausen to Dachau via Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, the entire German landscape is peppered with permanent sites of the genocidal Nazi regime. Virtually every city, town and large village has at least a plaque indicating the site of a synagogue, of a Jewish community now no longer . The German school curriculum has the most structured integration of the Holocaust into the overall accounting of the German past. No child graduates without a solid immersion into the Holocaust and acquaintance with the worst deeds of the Third Reich. No nation is as aware of and has so confronted its dark past as has Germany.
France still waffles over the Vichy years; Switzerland still refuses to acknowledge its dealings with the Nazis; the Vatican continues to play ostrich; the International Red Cross sits tight on most of its wartime archives; even England has much more to admit; not to mention Slovakia, Poland, etc. Germans, however, on the whole, have come clean, Goldhagen's one book crusade notwithstanding. If any nation has shouldered the responsibility of carrying the full burden of guilt for the deeds of its parents and, now, of its grandparents, it has been Germany. Whatever their failings, and there are several, especially among academics and intellectuals in general, they will not be corrected by an awesome monument in Berlin.
Of course, the monument will be; the government has willed it. It will elicit much discussion, often rancorous, in the media. There will, of necessity, be countless op-ed pieces, pontificating in various directions. And by the turn of the millennium, Germans will have their Holocaust Monument, no doubt with much fanfare of speeches by "prominent" people from all over. Yet once the festivities are over, and everyday life returns to Germany and its capital, the monument will be there and very little will change. With or without the monument, future Germans and their governments will have, force majeure, to ponder from time to time the unresolvable meaning of their Holocaust legacy; but not because the monument prompted them to do so.
The German equivalent of Zachor! Niemals vergessen! has its own dynamics totally unrelated to monumentalia, to museums, even to politicians. The living ghosts of the past have their own ways of re-asserting themselves. The tragic US burden of past slavery lives on, despite the absence of a Museum of Slavery in Washington, DC. Germany, birthplace of the Holocaust, is doomed for generations to be so identified, if not by its own people, then certainly by Jews all over the world, Jews determined not to allow future Germans to forge t. As long as Jews remember, so will the next generations of Germans. To Chancellor Helmut Kohl and to the good citizens of Berlin: Forget the monument; remember instead the Holocaust. Should your future co-citizens lapse into forgetfulness, it will be the Jewish obligation to make good on their sacred vow to remember . For it was taken not to avoid Jewish forgetting that is impossible but to head off the weak memories of the rest of the world.
As for genocide memorials in general, future victims and heirs to genocide may want to take stock of Germany's experiences before embarking on their own ventures to lock in past tragedies in cold stone and cement.
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)
Whose "Mein Kampf" is it? To Censure or Not
In the wake of considerable pressure, both from Jewish and non-Jewish groups, the publication of a Hungarian version of Hitler's Mein Kampf was declared "unconstitutional," that is, a violation of individual rights, though "Why?" was poorly explained. An English version was also banned in Hungary. Emotions aside, was the verdict conducive to an open society? Can a book whose contents are controversial and offensive actually violate a person's or a group's rights? If so, which right(s)? In 1993, in Poland, the publisher of the same book was charged, but acquitted, with "praising fascism." And in the Czech Republic, book vendors have been persuaded not to display copies of Mein Kampf. Politically and psychologically, these acts of thought control are understandable; but are they excusable academically and are they in harmony with the spirit of a liberal, open society?
We think not. One person's poisonous book is not necessarily another's. What is "heretical" for one can be "acceptable" for another. In the interest of free learning, public libraries should not be empowered to exclude controversial materials, budget permitting. Nor should the reading public be deprived of any kind of text. For to acknowledge the reverse is to insist on a morality squad, a committee entrusted with the determination of what individuals may and should not read. In a truly open society, there ought never to be an "imprimatur," a centrally issued seal of approval. This truly would be the first treacherous step onto the proverbial slippery slope towards censorship.
Mein Kampf is not a literary classic it has no stylistic merit aside from Hitler's idiosyncratic oratorical language; it has neither aesthetic nor contextual nobility or virtues. However, it is of considerable historical interest; it is not just political pornography. It has, therefore, to be available both to the general as well as to the learned public.
Mein Kampf can be voluntarily rejected: no one should be compelled to buy it and/or read it. In most cases, such tomes as Hitler's tend to speak to the already converted and fail utterly in swaying the minds of those whose values are antithetical to the author. Fear is expressed that the poison of Mein Kampf can infect those in between, those lacking strong convictions. Such a fear usually rests on an elitist and paternalistic doubt that most common-sensical people are incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, that they will succumb to the seductive words of a demagogue.
That is a mindset similar to that of those who burn books whose contents they fear will infect the readers. The Nazi book burnings in 1934 of "dangerous" authors and their "anti-Aryan" thoughts should remind everyone of the real danger, the threat to a democratic society in which the free exchange of ideas is a higher priority than the purging of books such as Mein Kampf.
Once a society's government formally and officially condemns one work, it will soon compile an entire list of forbidden texts, a list with no limits. Do we really want a secular variant of the Vatican's Index? Such a society would be plagued by ceaseless charges of secular "heresy" and secular "blasphemy." Such an atmosphere would quickly stifle all forms of "unorthodox" expressions and encourage anti-intellectualism.
For example, how many non- or even anti-Marxists have read Das Kapital or, at least, the Communist Manifesto? During extreme times of red-baiting in the US, these texts were almost impossible to place on university course reading lists. How many Jews have actually read the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Hardly pleasant reading, but an excellent entrée into the convoluted mind of the antisemite prone to conspiracy theories. There was a time when reading John Milton's Paradise Lost was tantamount to a mortal sin for 17th century Catholics; yet today, Catholics, Protestants, and non-Christians read it unafraid, regardless of its once "insidious" reputation. Will not Mein Kampf, in turn, become a relic of its time? There are already tens of millions for whom Hitler is ancient history or who have never heard of him.
Censorship is not the answer for protecting a democratic society. Censorship poses a greater danger than the "dangerous" books it seeks to protect the public from. It is a great temptation in times of stress and anxiety to flirt with censorship. But one quickly comes to ones senses upon trying to answer the question: Who will be the censors? Who chooses them? What criteria should underlie their judgments? Should majority public opinion rule? If so, then the public must first read the offfensive book before it is removed from sight. Or should only a "representative" group read and decide the content of future intellectual discourse? In the light of such weighty concerns, the issue of publishing Hitler's Mein Kampf seems trivial.
Yet this controversy does have its ramifications. In the controversy over Professor Jefffrey (See The Genocide Forum I/9 and II/1) one issue was her serious contention that the basic precepts of Nazism must be learned if the Holocaust and Nazi antisemitism are to be grasped. Pedagogically, she is on the mark. Yet her politically "correct" opponents cruelly labeled her a promoter of Nazism, as if teaching about Nazism were synonymous with proselytizing. Similarly, publishing Mein Kampf is not going to swell the ranks of proto-Nazis. Ought we to ban the collected speeches of Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung, both of them mass killers? Or of David Duke and of Louis Farrakhan? Where would it stop? (We would like to hear from the Forum's readers!)
Henry R. Huttenbach (CCNY)