About the Genocide Forum

A Platform for post-Holocaust Commentary

  1. Democracy, Capitalism and Genocide
  2. Resistance and Pacifism in the Face of Genocide
  3. Goldhagen's Genocide Justice: Guilty Until Proven Otherwise
  4. (Mis)Using the Holocaust: To Each His/Her Own
  5. Who is a (Holocaust)Survivor?  Category or Clique?
  6. Bashing Vatican Bashers: Shooting the Messenger

January-February 2000
Year 6, No. 3

Bonnie Falchuk: Managing Editor
Carol Rittner: Associate Editor
Henry R. Huttenbach: Founder- Editor
Sandrine Dikambi: Assistant Editor

Democracy, Capitalism and Genocide

The 1949 UN Genocide Convention specifically lists demographic politics as an instrument with the potential of endangering the existence of a group.  This is covered by Article II(c).  At the time of drafting the convention, the authors had the examples of World War II in mind, specifically forced mass expulsion, "resettlement" and deportation, three aspects of the same process of uprooting.  If they had waited fifty years they might have included an inverse policy, namely, the act of mass transference of one ethnic group in order to transform an indigenous people into a struggling minority in its own ancestral territory, an imperial practice of the Soviet Union, in particular in Estonia and Latvia.  In the former, the rate of russification by ethno-demographic inundation threatened a people of less than one million.  In the latter, the titular population had shrunk to a bare 52 percent of the total.  The tactic was a potent tool in the policy of Soviet ethno-homogenization.  One more generation in a Soviet context and both ethnic groups would have been reduced to a non-viable status.

For over two decades Chinese governments have employed similar demographic strategies vis-à-vis the non-Han minorities in the far western regions of the People's Republic of China.  In the mountainous west reside several million Muslims of various ethnic groupings and Buddhists in Tibet and west Qinghai.  As a way of neutralizing separatist tendencies among Uighurs and Tibetans, the Chinese government has planned to upset the ethno-democratic balance in favor of the Han.  Over the years it has encouraged soldiers stationed in these regions to stay and settle.  This policy was backed by generous subsidies.

Now the Chinese authorities have intensified their campaign.  The plan is to resettle nearly 60,000 Han farmers and their families (i.e., about 180,000-200,000 persons) to the Qinghai province.  Not only is this territory claimed by Tibet, but Tibetans have for centuries tilled the soil there, always as a significant majority.  Now they face literal demographic drowning by huge numbers of Han being encouraged to leave their ancestral lands and settle in distant Qinghai, thereby enlarging the Han grip on all of China.

What makes this ethnocidal (therefore genocidal) policy especially noteworthy is China's plan to fund the project.  It has recently applied to the World Bank to underwrite this move to the tune of an initial loan of $40 million. Significantly, the World Bank is a US dominated organization.  So far, the money has been approved by the World Bank's board with US support, the latter eager to ingratiate itself with an economy that promises major US investments and profits.  However, the loan still has to be renewed by an independent board of the World Bank.  Were the loan upheld, then the US would be directly associated with this genocidal threat (in the form of reducing Tibetans to a weak minority and, thereby, endangering the future of their ethnic (cultural) survival), keeping in mind that systematic culturecide has already been committed by China in Tibet since the 1950 invasion.  That indeed is a tragic and ironic position for the US to be in as the world's sole democratic mega-power, now reduced to a moral slave of its own economic needs.

Were the loan to go through, we would be witnessing a Faustian convergence of Capitalism, Democracy and Genocide.  Readers, watch your tax money at work.

Henry R. Huttenbach

Resistance and Pacifism in the Face of Genocide

At the end of October, a two-day conference was devoted to "Bonhoeffer's dilemma: the Ethics of Violence."  But is there a real dilemma, regardless of whether Dietrich Bonhoeffer may or may not have had such scruples?  As most know, in extremis, the German theologian finally overcame his pacifist, moral inhibitions and consented to give his imprimatur to a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in order to bring down a regime he considered evil.  Whether he gave his consent so that the genocidal killing of Jews would cease remains unclear, despite attempts to credit him with such intentions.  Chronologically, Bonhoeffer's "conversion" to active (physical) resistance against the Third Reich came towards the end of 1943.  By then most Jews were dead and the lost battle of Stalingrad in January 1943 effectively pointed to a German defeat.  In other words, it was too late to save most of the Jews and virtually too late to overthrow the government.  The allies would have to do that.

Bonhoeffer aside, there is still the stated problem posed by the pacifist in the face of state-induced suppression.  Is the pacifist ethically bound to suffer silently without resorting to physical opposition, that is to violent resistance?  Does the doctrine of pacifism automatically imply the abandonment of self-defense?  Is there not an ethics of self-protection, an imperative to preserve one's own life and an equally strong injunction to protect others from violent evil?  Is violence in the name of evil to be given free reign through non-action?  Or is there "positive" violence, one set in opposition to immoral or "negative" violence?

It seems that the word violence has been too quickly associated with that which is illegitimate and illegal.  After all, is there not a legitimate violence of restraint, of preventing destructive violence?  Do we not physically restrain our children from harming themselves and others?  This is not the language of pure instinct but of calculated common-sensical morality.  Protection at times calls for stern intervention.  A doctrinal adherence to policy and morality of absolute, exception-less non-violence is both destructive and extends free reign to evil.  How, then, is the cause of good to prevail if it is totally denied, under all circumstances?  Access to physical means applied within practical limits and moral parameters is a moral imperative.  Pacifism should not be synonymous with the abandonment of all reason.  It should be the voice of sane and sober restraint but not the voice of suicide.  If that stance were carried to its terminus ad absurdum one would be in a realm of moral and physical anarchy.  Social order, a sine qua non for any ethical polity, must rest on some kind of ethical force.  Otherwise pacifism becomes an invitation to murderous behavior, making pacifism an instrument of evil.

In the context of genocide, pacifism becomes potentially a handmaiden to the murderers.  It gives them a carte blanche.  Abdication from strong and timely resistance is a call for unrestrained, anti-Christian thought and deed.  Pacifism in its fullest form creates a moral vacuum.  In retrospect, a pacifist stance vis-à-vis Hitler would have been an abrogation of moral responsibility.  However torturous his path, however late, Bonhoeffer did the right thing to condone an attentat on Hitler, even though he may not have had Jewish suffering in mind.  Had he not done so, he would have been in the position of the Pennsylvania Quakers who refused to take up arms against the American Indians, but, at the same time had no qualms in calling for Federal troops to protect them from the "evil" Indian attacks.

Since genocide must be stopped both at home and abroad, the pacifist must be categorized as a co-conspirator.  As for the "Christian" pacifist, however well intentioned, one wonders what out of context quotes from Jesus serve as the foundation for such a doctrine of dis-involvement?  There are times when reaching for the sword is a form of prayer and religious obligation.  In its absence, what will one say to the dead victims and the survivors of genocidal violence?  A lame apology?

Henry R. Huttenbach

Godhagen's Genocide Justice: Guilty Until Proven Otherwise

Revisiting Goldhagen's still controversial book may seem passé.  Nevertheless, there remains an abundance of unfinished business in Hitler's Willing Executioners despite several books and articles in response.  Goldhagen's now well-known thesis has been scrutinized more thoroughly than most scholars' entire opus enjoys (or suffers) in a professional lifetime.

Among the unanswered questions is a relatively unexplored one: his methodology to determine guilt, namely, of someone having harbored radical antisemitic sentiments.  This may supply a key to his reasoning towards the evidence.  If, as his thesis requires, most Germans were permeated by an extreme form of antisemitism, Goldhagen is obliged to come up with the satisfactory proof.

Clearly he is unable to interview a cross-section of the German public's levels of prejudice in the 1930s.  He must, instead, remain content with another source of evidence, thousands of testimonies/depositions given after the war by Germans implicated in war crimes.  With this information Goldhagen assumes two things: 1) that these statements represent a microcosm of the opinions held by the German population at large; 2) that the testimonies of these implicated collaborators in the Final Solution i) can be taken at face value if the respondent admits to antisemitic sentiments, and ii) that those who deny being antisemitic must be assumed guilty despite their denial, unless independent, corroborating evidence can be supplied to support their claims of innocence.

With this approach Goldhagen has conveniently fashioned for himself a win-win methodology.  Nevertheless, it is, of course, first, highly questionable whether his samples taken from court records are a true microcosm from whose testimony he can extrapolate the status of the macrocosm with respect to most Germans harboring revolutionary, exterminationist antisemitism.  (As a sociologist Goldhagen, it seems, was satisfied with concluding that his smaller sample was indeed representative, without testing the validity of that conclusion).  Secondly, it is equally doubtful whether Goldhagen's reasoning is acceptable with respect to his draconian criterion: "guilty until proven otherwise."

Put in his own words, Goldhagen applies the following principle: that he would "discount all self-exculpatory testimony that finds no corroboration from other sources."  This may be emotionally satisfying, but it has no basis in either legal or academic evidentiary rules, atleast in Anglo-Saxon judicial and scholarly circles.  It is interesting that his critics, some of whom were aware of his home-made methodology did not pick up on this flawed and dangerous logic.  For it literally allows Goldhagen to "cook" his own evidence to taste, i.e., to service his thesis of a pan-German genocidal penchant towards the Jews.

In contrast to the spirit of US constitutional law, Goldhagen claims that in studying the Holocaust, the accused are guilty as charged unless they can prove their innocence; the primary burden of proof must fall on the defendant and not on the prosecutor.  Philosophically put, this means that the accused must prove a negative, which is logically impossible and legally impermissible except after conviction.  In Goldhagen's scheme there is no room for reasonable doubt, especially if the emphasis is shifted towards "a reasonable doubt of guilt."  Simply put, Goldhagen has reintroduced a reactionary, pre-Enlightenment procedure in the pursuit of justice which smacks of an authoritarian mindset and is reminiscent of a Kafkaesque world in which culpability must be disproven.

Once Goldhagen has made this the centerpiece of his methodology, he has little trouble achieving his aims, namely, to accumulate sufficient evidence to demonstrate the depth and breadth of extreme antisemitism in the Third Reich, sufficient to recruit armies of genocidal executioners.  His method is fail safe because he knows he is safe, there simply being no corroborative evidence to the contrary.  No doubt he is unaware of the philosophy of terror he is toying with, that all espousals of innocence must be automatically rejected.  The temptation was there after the war during the preparations of the International War Crimes Tribunal.  It was suggested that since the SS was classified as a criminal organization, each of its members could be held as a criminal and assumed guilty of crimes unless he was able to demonstrate otherwise.  Luckily this approach was dropped by the IWCT.

The only questions that remain are about Goldhagen himself: was he aware of the underlying philosophy of justice governing his pursuit of justice?  If not, what accounts for his myopia?  Over-zealousness, carelessness, or intellectual parochialism?  These are not idle thoughts: they go to the heart of how we conduct genocide research.  For finding any one guilty of genocide ought to be based on a professionally sound methodology sustaining a liberal philosophy of justice.

Henry R. Huttenbach

(Mis)Using the Holocaust: To Each His/Her Own

The past has always been there for those who needed it.  That is almost a truism.  Every historian has run into uses and misuses of a particular past.  All national and ethnic groups dip into the past in accordance with their stated contemporary interests and their overt and covert agendas.  Each group selects what is most helpful and what is less so.  Some questions are asked and others deliberately not; some answers are eagerly pursued and others studiously side-stepped.  This dynamics is as true in general as it is in particular with respect to genocide, and, specifically, with the Holocaust.

Looking at the "fate" of the Holocaust in the hands of different groups, one can clearly discern trends at bending it to different wills, needs, or visions.  There is, without a doubt, an Americanization of the Holocaust over the last half-century.  Its characteristics are not difficult to identify: chiefly, it is the linking of the Holocaust to present racism, prejudice, intolerance, injustice, homophobia and other ills that are the favorites of liberals who sense social calamity somewhere down the line unless Americans are faced with a "what happens unless…"  kind of apocalyptic reasoning.  The underlying (flawed) pedagogical premise of the US Memorial Holocaust Museum – that racism in the US could lead to genocide as in Germany – is the institutional embodiment of this approach.

Then there is the Israeli counterpart, the zionization of the Holocaust.  This is marked by several syndromes, one being the focus on exaggerated resistance as the central theme; another obvious one is: had Israel only existed earlier!  How radically different the past would have been had Jews in the Diaspora had a Jewish state to flee to.  If in the US victimization is stressed; in Israel, the emphasis is on heroism and empowerment.

Space permitting, one could speak at length of (West)German and Soviet versions of the Holocaust, both reflecting fluctuating domestic circumstances, the former contextualizing the Holocaust inside World War II and overall German policy; the latter is the marginalization of Jewish victimization as a part of the Great Fatherland War.  In Germany, for example, in 1994, there was a national orgy of local, regional and federal commemorations of resistance to Hitler.  Each town found its homegrown opponent to Nazism, to the point one wonders whether there were enough supporters of the regime!  In the USSR the Holocaust on Soviet soil was pored into the melting pot of Soviet dead who, it was said, suffered equally under fascism.

There is also a trend towards Christianizing  the Holocaust.  This ranges from an accusatory assessment that the genocide was designed and carried out by practicing Christians, to a broader crime or common experience that included at least an equal number of Christian victims (e.g. 3 million Polish Jews and 3 million ethnic Catholic Poles killed by the Nazis).  It stresses portraying the churches as fellow victims of Nazi tyranny.  In between there are various Christian efforts to find some exculpatory redemption from an event that has put a dark stain on sensitized Christian consciences.

To each his own?  Is there a "real" Holocaust beyond those portrayed by the coopters and manipulators?  Can the Holocaust be "rescued" from its (ab)users?  Or are these tendencies to appropriate the Jewish tragedy unavoidable and will historians have to suffer this mal-use of the past until all interested parties have deceased and, therefore, ceased to promote their narrow agendas?

The time of a purely disinterested Holocaust scholarship is not yet.  It may still be one or two generations away, perhaps more.  However, there are signs of such a community of younger scholars, scientifically and psychologically sufficiently disengaged, appearing in Germany.  This is both heartening and ironic.

There are those who project the "universal" impact of the Holocaust far into the future; thereby inflating it beyond the probable and compromising disinterested scholarly scrutiny and common sense.  All "monumental" events eventually lose their immanence.  At one time Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was a shocking violation of Rome's unwritten constitution.  Is there anyone today who loses any sleep over this "dastardly' breach of law?  The Holocaust need not lose its significance, but it needs to shed the accrued layers of mis- and mal- interpretations partisan interests have painted upon it.

Henry R. Huttenbach

Who is a (Holocaust) Survivor? Category or Clique?

This may seem a provocative question; perhaps it is.  It follows, logically, on the heels of a previous article, "How Many Survivors Are (Were) There?" (TGF 3/6) which generated some "heat", most of it unpublishable.

The term survivor has been around since the end of the war in 1945.  It was then categorically applied exclusively to those who had gone through the concentration camp experience during the war.  This criterion also included those few who escaped and joined bands of partisans in the Soviet sphere in the east and less so those who belonged to the French Marquis (underground) Resistance Movement in the west, presumably because the latter had not undergone the experience of incarceration in an extermination camp.  The stress problem stems from the fact that no formal criteria to define a survivor were ever agreed upon.  From the start it was a matter of improvisation, of the views of self-ascribed authorities who promoted a narrow definition or of Jewish survivors who so labeled themselves, and not of others with separate experiences of coming out of the war alive.  A generation later, the category "hidden children" was added to those considered bona fide survivors of the Holocaust.

What initially muddied the waters was the process of financial compensation by the West German government.  At that point the concept "Jewish victim of Nazism" was introduced.  This brought together all Jews negatively impacted by the Third Reich.  This meant there was the possibility of being both a victim and a survivor, raising the germane question: Is not a living Jewish victim of Nazism in the 1930s also a survivor of the Holocaust?  If not, why not?

The original criterion – coming out alive from the concentration camps – seems unduly and unkindly restrictive.  What of someone incarcerated in a camp in the 1930s?  Does he qualify?  After all, Jews were killed in Dachau and Buchenwald after their arrest during Kristallnacht.  According to Emil Fackenheim, who endured such imprisonment, the answer is an unqualified "No!"  In that case, using inverse logic, had he been killed at that time (1938-1939), he would not qualify as a victim.  In many cases it is false modesty that prompts  one not to be classified with those who suffered and survived "more" and "worse"; but the practice of comparative suffering is a non-academic exercise.

If one takes into consideration the entire spectrum of Jewish victimization by Nazi antisemitic policy and extermination program, it would range from those who felt compelled to leave immediately in January 1933 to those who remained alive in the Death camps until the SS abandoned them.  Conceptually, surviving camp inmates have one element in common, survival.  What they do not have in common is various kinds of survival and different forms of loss.  Into the spectrum should be factored each of the subcategories of survivor-hood, including emigration.  Specificity and distinction should not be denied; setting up a hierarchy and special class of survivors excluding others from their individual identity of having escaped death at the hands of the Nazis should be avoided.  To plead for special status is demeaning to those who were fortunate enough to avoid the worst, short of death.  To argue for an elite category of survivors is to forment needless divisiveness.

The same arguments and suggestions apply to survivors of genocide in general.  Emigrants, expellées, refugees, stateless persons, displaced persons, resistance fighters, the hidden, and "graduates" of concentration camps all qualify in some degree as do survivors.  All were targeted by the architects of the Final Solution.  No less do all the surviving Tutsi of the Hutus' killings have to be recognized as survivors even if some were spared the worst.  Armenians make no artificial distinctions between those Armenians slaughtered in the Syrian Desert and those who fortunately evaded lethal pogroms in the cities of west Turkey.  All those Armenians once living inside the border regions of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1922 are classified as survivors.

Once one embarks on the path of ex- and inclusion along invalid lines and according to false criteria, the term survivor loses its significance.  Survivor must be viably applied to cover all those who, in one way or another, survived the genocidists' wrath.  Nothing is gained by insisting on anything but criteria that withstand criticism based on facts and analysis based on sound criticism.  As new genocidal events take place, a more compassionate assignment of survivor status should be encouraged to avoid futile debates and dead-end discussions.

Henry R. Huttenbach

Bashing Vatican Bashers: Shooting the Messenger

Pope Pius XII was and remains a central controversial figure vis-à-vis the Holocaust.  The extent of a Vatican-Berlin entente beyond the Concordat reached by the Pope and the Führer grows as fragments of information become available, despite the Church's keeping its archives virtually hermetically sealed.  What is known, however, though incomplete, points increasingly away from a benign resolution of the lingering suspicions that Rome's pro-German stance was also prompted by a deadly papal animus for Jews.  A recent book by John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius II, is the latest contribution in a series of scholarly works probing this dark side of church diplomacy during the twelve years of the Third Reich.

Not surprisingly, the very announcement of the book elicited instant opprobrium and knee-jerk objections from the Vatican, (not unlike the occasional heavy-breathing letters sent to TGF in response to items questioning the stance of the Church during the Holocaust).  In brief, Cornwell makes two significant points which he documents adequately enough, at least till the Vatican makes its holdings on the period unconditionally available to the public: 1) that Pius XII harbored a bitter personal streak of antisemitism throughout his life and 2) that he clearly approved of at least Hitler's destructive if not genocidal policy towards the Jews.  These are not tangental accusations; they go to the very heart of the era of the Final Solution and Catholic policy.

So how can the problem be resolved?  Only through openness.  Interestingly the same problem faces the Turkish government.  Both the Vatican and Ankara keep a tight lid on their documents of things past, thereby hoping to defend and protect the actions and policies of their predecessors over sixty and eighty years ago.  No one is accusing today's Vatican nor today's Turkish leaders of antisemitism and genocide, respectively.  The air would be rapidly cleared if all the pertinent files were opened, allowing everybody to look, research, and evaluate, in order to come to a fair and just conclusion.  Then the books can finally be closed and (un)founded suspicions laid to rest.  Any other alternative will only lead to rancor and interminable disputation.  To stand in the way of information is to guarantee yet another Cornwell, more books and articles, and more bitterness and, worse, lingering suspicion.

Looking at one's collective past is never easy : ask the Swiss banks; the German insurance companies and industrial corporations; ask the French about Vichy; the Belgians about their collaboration; the Austrians about the Anschluss; the Swedes about their pro-German neutrality; and no less the Catholic Church and its intimacies with the Nazi state.  This is not just about the Pope or the Vatican and official Catholic policies.  It is an all-European malaise with an obligation for all of Europe to look at itself in the mirror of the past, specifically that of World War II and the part played by each player.  It is a matter of paying a debt for all the denial, prevarication and cover-up since 1945.

The last half century has witnessed an international attempt at postponing, whitewashing, and outright evasions of justice with respect to one's involvement in Nazi genocidal policies.  Nevertheless, trial by trial, document by document, the historic truth is being uncovered, so slowly that lessons have not been fully learned.  Had Vatican-German relations been fully confronted at the outset, perhaps today there would be no Catholic clerics from Rwanda, either in the docket of an international tribunal accusing them of genocide or in hiding (with Rome's connivance).  Perhaps one lesson will be learned after all: that the problem, this problem, is not about to go away.  The memory of specific questions has been institutionalized: they will be asked unremittingly till satisfactory answers are provided.  Involvement in genocide and flirting with genocidists is no trivial matter: there is no statute of limitations for murderers and their allies.

Henry R. Huttenbach

 

About The Genocide Forum

 The Forum is a publication of the Center for the Study of Ethnonationalism located on the campus of the City College of New York.  The founder and editor of The Genocide Forum is Professor Henry R. Huttenbach.

 The Genocide Forum, which appears bi-monthly, is intended to serve as a convenient vehicle of exchange to discuss critical issues of common interest to students of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  The Forum is designed to accommodate experts in the field to share their concerns via concise (1,500 words) analytic essays.

 Contributors are invited to submit their essay on a 3.5" disk (Macintosh/MicroSoft Word) with one double-spaced print-out to Professor Henry R. Huttenbach, History Department, The City College of New York, Convent Avenue at 138th St., New York, NY 10031. Tel: (212) 650-7384; Fax (718) 624-0450.

 Back Issues of The Genocide Forum are available on request as long as supplies last.  Complete sets of back issues are available on 3.5" diskette (Macintosh/Microsoft) for $25.

 Quotations may be made as long as proper credit is given.  Duplication of long passages or entire articles require the written permission of the editor.

  The Genocide Forum is made possible through the partial support of the Division of Humanities of the City College of New York. 

  Nota Bene: Views expressed by authors are not necessarily those of the editor.

Henry R. Huttenbach
c/o History Department
City College of New York
Convent Ave. at 138th Street
New York, NY 10031
 

A Publication of The Center for The Study of Ethnonationalism
The City College of The City University of New York