About the Genocide Forum

A Platform for post-Holocaust Commentary

  1. More on Pacifism and Genocide
  2. A Misunderstanding of Pacifism
  3. Resettlement Policies: the Need for Criteria for Moral Judgment
  4. The End of the Usti Wall
  5. A World of Work and Labor: The Genocide Connection
  6. Putting the Holocaust to Rest in Latvia

May-June 2000
Year 6, No. 5

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

More on Pacifism and Genocide

In "Resistance and Pacifism in the Face of Genocide," The Genocide Forum, January-February, 2000, Henry Huttenbach raises the crucial dilemma of pacifists facing genocidal violence.  In a literal barrage of questions Huttenbach asks, among others, whether it is legitimate to use violence to prevent destructive violence.  This is an important question and scholars who study violence and its relationship to authority have posited some categories which help to provide an answer to Huttenbach's question.

For example, Barrington Moore (1978)1 suggests that there are different types of authority.  Positive authority essentially is devoted to the preservation of life, the achievement of a "common good," among people.  Examples include authority such as that of a physician diagnosing a patient, assuming it is a correct diagnosis, and some examples given by Huttenbach of force used to stop or prevent destruction of human life.  In short, positive authority is authority used to preserve life while negative authority is authority devoted to the destruction of human life.

Authority, of course, is tied to the use of violence through leadership, if you will, through the organizers of the respective actions.  Those who study the specifics of violence, therefore, use a similar distinction when they divide violence into several categories.  Most common is a distinction between instrumental violence and expressive violence.  Instrumental violence is aimed at the achievement of a specific goal or set of goals.  It might, obviously, be positive, devoted to preserving life, or negative, devoted to destroying life.  An additional distinction is often made between collective violence and individual violence.  Naturally, as with any set of categories, there are overlaps, but it quickly becomes apparent that violence devoted to the preservation of life is instrumental and collective violence.  Political violence is always instrumental.  Most often, the positive use of violence takes the form of counter violence to stop some abuse of human rights or to counter violence initiated to destroy life.  Since the world's political leaders and institutions remain reactive rather than proactive, counter violence to stop genocide is usually not undertaken until after the genocidal acts have been well underway. 

Unfortunately, in the real world, pacifism cannot effectively do the work of countering violence.  It is simply naive fantasy to argue that a Hitler or a Milosevic could have been stopped with passive resistance.  Passive resistance might  be effective in a situation such as the civil rights movement in the United Sates where there exist institutionalized guarantees against the use of destructive instrumental violence, but in  Germany or the former Yugoslavia the remedy of the dictator is  quite simple.  As with the White Rose, you simply eliminate the pacifists and continue with your extermination. In the real world, although it is unfortunate, sometimes the only way to stop the destruction of human life is to destroy other human life. 

We all devoutly wish it were not so, but we cannot live in a fantasy world and allow millions of people to be exterminated.  Therefore, our options in the real world remain limited and not always pleasant.

Herbert Hirsch
Virginia Commonwealth University

1. Moore, Barrington, Jr.  1978.  Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt.  New York: M. E. Sharpe.

A Misunderstanding of Pacifism

In his article "Resistance and Pacifism in the Face of Genocide" Henry R. Huttenbach asks some hard questions regarding pacifism and the Holocaust. Professor Huttenbach's critique goes well beyond his analysis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's dilemma in approving the assassination attempt against Hitler. His series of rhetorical questions challenge the ethics and efficaciousness of the philosophy of pacifism, because implied is the view that pacifism permits evil to have its own way.

Whether one is a pacifist or not, it is important to recognize that pacifism is not the simplistic concept of turning the other cheek, accepting suffering, and wishing evil would go away. Although pacifists do not all think alike, they naturally share Huttenbach's condemnation of genocide and believe one must act against it and its related horrors. The difference between them and Huttenbach is one of means. Pacifists believe that non-violent action is the best way to prevent violence. At issue in Huttenbach's article is the effectiveness of pacifist tactics. Historically, pacifist methods have prevailed in the face of evil, not only in India under Gandhi's leadership and in the US under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., but also in the Third Reich where there were notable successes, for example, the Catholic Church's opposition to the secret Nazi program of euthanasia and the German wives' demonstrations in the Rosenstrasse in Berlin near the end of the war that saved the lives of thousands of Jewish spouses. Also, in occupied Denmark the collective resistance of the population to the Nazi deportation of Jews saved many lives.

Huttenbach poses several important questions: "Is the pacifist ethically bound to suffer silently without resorting to physical opposition, that is, to violent resistance?"  Here the idea of physical opposition needs to be defined. Not all physical opposition is violent, but most pacifist opposition is, nonetheless, physical: sit-ins, stand-ins, hunger strikes, marches, demonstrations, and the like. Governments faced with the protests of non-violent groups usually deem the actions taken by pacifists as physical provocation that justifies the use of retaliatory force. Pacifists also believe that their willingness to accept unmerited pain and punishment produces a "positive" dynamic that alters the hearts of perpetrators of violence.

Huttenbach asks further: "Does the doctrine of pacifism automatically imply the abandonment of self-defense?"  Clearly the answer is no because there are numerous ways to defend oneself other than with club or gun. Huttenbach goes on: "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?"  Clearly the answer is yes, but pacifists need imagination in devising appropriate strategies that have a chance of success. Huttenbach asks: "Is violence in the name of evil to be given free rein through non-action?"  Certainly not, but it is necessary to recognize that some forms of refusal are also powerful forces for good. In fact, resistance to evil is a moral good in itself.

Huttenbach then poses this penetrating question: "How, then, is the cause of good to prevail if it [exception-less non-violence] is  totally denied, under all circumstances?"  As noted, pacifists are not all of the same mind. Some do use moderate "violence" such as the destruction of property to prevent evil. Nonetheless, the pacifist believes he creates by his example new forces for good that have unforeseen positive effects. It is simply impossible to determine what the results of personal or collective witness will be.

A single sentence by Huttenbach synthesizes his philosophy and also that of pacifists: "Access to physical means applied within practical limits and moral parameters is a moral imperative."  That is exactly what pacifism is: "physical means applied within practical limits and moral parameters."  When guided by imagination and intelligence, "physical means applied within practical limits and moral parameters" can be very effective. However, it is worth noting, that successful pacifist action usually requires a certain unity of opposition to evil. While this critical mass of unity can be produced by the behavior of a single person, it most often is the product of the solidarity of many acting together. When this prerequisite unity is lacking, pacifist means unfortunately often fail, but it must be remembered that violence in the cause of good also frequently fails.

In relationship to the Third Reich, pacifism was scarcely tried. When it was tried, it often worked.  The Holocaust does not illustrate the failure of pacifism, but the failure of an adequate number of Germans to oppose evil.

Robert C. Conard
University of Dayton

Resettlement Policies: the Need of Criteria for Moral Judgement

The concern of Henry R. Huttenbach that reverse resettlement policies (the encouraging of large numbers of people to move into a designated area) can be a form of genocide just as well as deportation and forced resettlement [see "Democracy, Capitalism and Genocide,"  Jan.-Feb. 2000: 2] is a well-taken point and raises broader moral questions beyond the present historical situations cited in the article (the resettlement of  Russians in Estonia and Latvia and the Han Chinese resettlement in areas traditionally Tibetan).

Such policies by governments and nations are not new but ancient, and they have certainly been practiced for several generations by what we now call free, democratic, western powers. These resettlements, as the article makes clear, are achieved not by forcing people to move into designated areas, but by encouraging them to do so by economic means. The enticements usually include free land, payments of transportation cost, generous start-up subsidies, and tax reductions. The purpose is always to bring a perceived racial, cultural, political, and economic advantage to the government or nation advancing the policy. Most often these initiatives are at the expense of the people already living in the designated area. This cost to the indigenous people is often loss of culture and sometimes even extinction. The intention of such policies – although rarely stated as such – is to upset the ethnic balance of the region for eco-geo-political gain.

The United States has used these methods to (re)settle the West, Great Britain to (re)settle parts of the empire (Northern Ireland, Africa, Australia, New Zealand). Very recently, while white Africa was breaking up, Australia and New Zealand used these economic incentives to lure Europeans fearing black rule to settle in lands where their race would be welcomed and their talents appreciated. These "resettlements" have led to loss of native land and culture in areas of Australia and New Zealand. Canada has also used these expansionist strategies for the resettlement of some of its native areas as well. Brazil and Mexico are typical of nations of South America using the same procedures today to expand one culture at the expense of another. In fact, it seems that most modern nations in imperialist phases of their history use these "gentle" methods as alternatives to more violent and repulsive measures.

What is important to contemplate in eco-geo-political resettlement strategies like those fostered now by China and Russia – furthered by the World Bank or not – is whether they are ever morally justifiable. To answer that question, nations might probe their consciences a bit.  Is preserving a culture always a moral good? Are some cultures "better " than others?  Who determines what is better? Is a utilitarian concern for the greater economic-political good for the greater number a valid standard? Who determines what is an economic-political good? It would be nice, as Professor Huttenbach advocates, if this practice of reverse resettlement would nudge citizens and governments to go down a path they tend to avoid rigorously, that of moral scrutiny of national policy.

Robert C. Conard
University of Dayton

The End of the Usti Wall

As readers will know, a wall was erected last October in the northern Czech town of Usti nad Labem, at the instigation of the town council and its mayor, ghettoising a section of the Roma population (Henry R. Huttenbach, "The Return of the Ghetto: Who Will Protest?" issue 6.2).  The good news is that it has since been pulled down by members of the Roma community, with the material and political support of (mainly local) anti-racist activists and the largely tacit support of at least some members of the Social Democratic Czech government.  The mayor's last act before resigning in January of this year was to arrange for bits of the wall to be put on sale as souvenirs.

As Huttenbach noted, the "Philosopher King" Havel, darling of the western liberal "intelligensia," made no active protest.  That was left to the European Roma Rights Centre, based in Budapest,1  and to those individuals who happened to know what was going on and who did what little they could.  But – and this is surely a central lesson of the episode, with immediate and obvious implications for the situation in Austria, where the neo-Nazi Freedom Party has recently taken six of ten cabinet posts in coalition government with the Conservatives – the little that could be done does seem to have helped.  In Britain, for instance, a campaigning journalist, Linda Grant, writing in a national newspaper, The Guardian, broke the story of what was being planned; other journalists and editors in public service broadcasting kept it in the news, however sporadically; and a number of individuals protested from such a position as they may have had.  Having organized an international conference in 1997 on Nationalism and Racism in the New Europe2  at J.E. Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem, I was able to use that connection to write to the rector to ask what the University was doing to oppose the project.  In light of his evasive dismissal of the concerns expressed, I pulled the plug on my own university's undergraduate exchange scheme with J.E. Purkyne, and wrote to him, with copies to the mayor and others, to say why.  Doubtless, on its own this would have been just a pinprick; but other individuals in other countries were doing similar things, and the cumulative effect made a difference.  Most importantly, I think, at least a minority of Czech citizens, and some government ministers, became embarrassed; a smaller minority still was encouraged to take action; and the Roma of Usti nad Labem, having for years suffered from increasing racism, were emboldened to take the matter into their own hands.  In other towns in the Czech Republic where local fascistic groups and individual racists and bigots – supported and encouraged by the Czech Republican Party, cousin to the Austrian Freedom Party – had been laying plans for similar ghettos, such movements were quashed, often at the instigation of people who might otherwise have remained bystanders.  One welcome, important and of course predictable effect has been that the Republicans seem to be losing support as some Czechs, at least, begin to reflect on their society's racism towards the Roma.

Not "Crying 'Wolf!' too early" might sometimes (though rarely) be a suitable tactic in university politics: but never in combating racism.

Bob Brecher
University of Brighton, UK

1   An extemely effective non-governmental monitoring and campaigning organization.  Its website is at http://errc.org; email errc@errc.org; and postal address 1386 Budapest 62, POBox 906/93, Hungary.

2   See Bob Brecher, Jo Halliday, Klara Kolinska (eds), Nationalism and Racism in the Liberal Order  (Aldershot, UK and Brookfield, USA: Ashgate Publishing, 1998).

A World of Work and Labor: The Genocide Connection

A memorable slogan of the SS custodians of the Nazi concentration camp system was the infamous statement "Arbeit Macht Frei" spelled out in metal strips over the main entrance gate for all unfortunate victims to see and agonize over.  How is it to be translated?  Traditionally it is rendered in English as "Work makes (or sets) you free."  But the German does not contain the personal dimension of the English.  A better rendition is "Work Liberates".  But what was it supposed to mean?  This is not simply a semantic problem resolved by an analysis of connotations and denotations; rather, the question of meaning is answered by the experiences of those who labored in the concentration camp.  According to them, the statement was a cruel euphemism, a cynical camouflage for murder.  Entering the "labor" camps, they quickly came face to face with the reality of "liberation" through "work.'  The camp motto was synonymous with a death sentence.  The policy of the SS camps was, literally, to work people to death.  The inmates, Jews in particular, were to be squeezed of their last drop of energy till they died from a combination of exhaustion, exposure, and lack of basic survival means: food, clothing, shelter, and sleep.  "Work" had become an instrument of genocide.

But is that work as it is understood traditionally?  In German there is only the word "Arbeit"; whereas in English there are two, "work" and "labor."  Are they synonymous and, therefore, interchangeable?  Or are there clear distinctions that should be preserved and articulated?

What does one associate with labor?  There is a whole string of cognates: labor conjures up physical acts; labor becomes hard in the penal system, when it is meted out as a punishment; labor, in the long run, implies routined activity, fatigue from monotony, deadly repetition, being in an inescapable rut.  Labor is what miners perform: it is dangerous and unhealthy.  Women go into labor: a painful final exertion in bringing a new life into being.  Judeo-Christian culture links the agony of labor (birth) with the price of original sin.  Child labor is understood in the context of exploitation, an illegal and immoral treatment of the young.  Labor is mainly involuntary and arduous.  Karl Marx would have been better served in English if one had translated his "Arbeiterklasse" or Proletariat as "the laboring class" and not "the working class."  The latter lacks the bite or sting of the excessive human energy that is poured into impersonal production at meager wages.  Labor, as its forceful derivative suggests, is laborious, physically draining, with little real compensation, neither psychic nor economic.  The rewards of labor are indeed slim.  Those who labor are ultimately worn of their health.  Labor eats away at the psyche and does not elevate the spirit.  If anything, labor leave one dispirited, worn down by the monotony of the assembly line or the boredom of day in and day out office routine such as endless filing and the accompanying numbing sameness of each day.

Work is otherwise, though with this caveat: it can be easily depreciated into labor and everything said about it in the previous paragraph.  Nevertheless, there has to be an antonym to the concept of labor as spelled out above.  And that is work.  Understood as such, work is everything that labor is not.  Work is or can be creative, and, therefore, energizing.  It has purpose beyond the act of labor often required to attain the impersonal goals of work: for example, the sweat and tears that go into forging a novel.  But once accomplished, there is elation; an observant reader would say that that is what follows the struggle of giving birth.  I concede this readily.  But that pleasure does not follow a back-breaking eight-hour shift in a steel mill or teaching six classes a day in an overcrowded classroom.  This is dreary labor, not inspiring work.

This is where Latin may help make the distinction.  Labor means first and foremost to toil, the emphasis being on physical struggle on the effort required to perform a particularly difficult, indeed at times, an impossible task.  Thus, Sysyphus, condemned to pushing a rock up a mountain side only to see it roll down again on reaching the peak, is the example par excellence of futile labor, not work!  One step further and we are in the world of the concentration camp in which thousands of innocents are condemned to toil in quarries, forced to carry boulders from one spot to another with no other purpose but to drain the inmates of their life energy, that is to murder them through lethal labor that has lost all its raison d'être except for one, to inflict deadly pain on the doer.  That is one radical step beyond the primary denotations in the Latin "labor," namely, fatigue and even distress.

In contrast, Latin also has operare, exercitare and, significantly, facere, all meaning to do, to make, to fabricate.  All imply a more cerebral kind of action, other than the menial and the strictly physical implied by labor.  Not incidentally, one speaks in German of "Lohnarbeit," in English "wage labor," suggesting that the concept of labor can be "sweetened" when there is monetary compensation attached to it.  Work, on the other hand, is not immediately thought of in conjunction with monetary remuneration.  Money is assumed to be a part of the rewards of work, but not one that fully justifies it.  Instead, money is given for services often less tangible than the exchange of labor for money.  Work implies quality, reputation, beauty, countless results not necessarily measurable such as weight and speed – so much tonnage, so many miles an hour – the coinage of labor.

Having created, however artificially, an abstract conceptual divide between work and labor, in everyday usage there is considerable overlap that binds the two terms.  They are neither absolutely distinct – two completely separate entities – nor are they practically fully interchangeable.  Thus, under certain circumstances work – if sufficiently mechanical and bureaucratized – can be corrupted into a version of labor; while more enlightened labor – such as house-keeping – if combined with other factors – can be elevated to partially pleasant work.  But in each case, removing the conditioners – mechanical routine and generous gifts – brings the pendulum back, either to the work side or the labor side of the equation.  They are, in fact, like two intersecting circles sharing a certain amount of common "territory" as a result of the nature of the language as it presently makes use of each term.

Thus, idioms tend to blur the basic differences but not to the extent that the two words are fully interchangeable in the translation of the sarcasticmotto welcoming the victims of genocides to the killing camps, where each detail of camp "life" was designed to create death, mass death, i.e. genocide.  Taken literally, it is labor that can and often does lead to death, not work.  If cruel irony is intended, then it is labor that kills.  The choice for a euphemism to replace "Macht Frei" has to be a verb since the English "makes free" is awkward and anticlimactic.  Consequently one is left with a choice of either "Labor frees" or "Labor liberates."  The irony – that labor somehow "emancipates" one from life (read: brings about death) is not lost in either case.  What speaks in favor of "Labor liberates" is the obvious: the catchy alliteration which better than "Labor frees" captures the intended biting sneer contained in the other.  The smell of genocide emanates more from the former.  "Frees" is too tied to the concept of being freed from shackles, from restraining bonds; whereas "liberates" has a metaphysical and metaphorical quality about it, thereby deepening the dark nature of Nazi genocide-speak.

For to fully grasp the meaning and impact of "Labor liberates" one must contextualize it not only with the concentration camp – the mass killing ground – but with the rest of the rich Nazi vocabulary of extermination, such as "special treatment", "resettlement", "shower", etc.  This language of annihilation was steeped in naked cruelty, hiding, almost hermetically, the existential reality of the Final Solution behind a smokescreen of benign-sounding words.  "Liberates" belongs to this class of terms systematically used by the executioners of genocide.

On the one hand, the horrendous reality of mass murder is thoroughly hidden; a monstrous lie, we might conclude.  And yet it was not a lie.  The victims were indeed to be "liberated", freed from life via a death from over-work, (there is no "over-labor") i.e. extreme labor explicitly designed to kill.  The labor in the camps would literally liberate them from the grotesque labor inflicted on them: utterly senseless labor with absolutely no purpose other than to liberate the prisoner from the intolerable agony of life.  Before his or her actual death, death would be welcomed as one would a messianic liberator, not a freedom fighter.  Before dying, the victims would pray for redemption, for the mercy of death to liberate them from a life robbed of all meaning except to die and to reduce unrelieved suffering.  In the camps there was nothing to look forward to: no true rest at the end from the criminal sentence of perpetual labor.  No hope except existential liberation from labor.  And that was death.

On a more positive note: work stems from the Anglo-Saxon "wrought" which basically means to make something.  Work and a product – a thing made – are inseparable.  They are only indirectly related in the concept of labor.  Since the industrial revolution, labor and product have been permanently separated by the machine.  Beethoven cannot be replaced; a welder can.  Work cannot be robbed of meaning; labor can.  When labor is reduced to extreme impersonal, bureaucratic acts, it begins to acquire the characteristics of which one would like to be made free.  In its most radical sense it calls for the termination of the labor in question via resignation, retirement or another job.  Where that is impossible, in its ultra-radical form, the only way to liberation is death.  This is how genocide enters into the circle of labor which it transforms into a lethal weapon, an instrument of systematic mass death.

Henry R. Huttenbach

Putting the Holocaust to Rest in Latvia

Three years ago, Andrew Ezergailis published an excellent monograph, The Holocaust in Latvia.  It is a balanced and fair scholarly appraisal, and most reviews attest to his broad research and absence of exaggerated claims that he has resolved all controversies, several – such as the precise sequence of events during the interim days bracketed by the Soviet retreat from Latvia and the German advance into Riga, the capital.  The extant documentation is simply insufficient to answer this and other related questions definitively.  Fortunately, some of these gaps have been filled in Ezergailis' 1999 Latvian version which adds an important chapter not found in the English edition.  Officially, the Latvian book has been well received and is being widely distributed in schools, thanks in part to the Soros Foundation's support.

Unfortunately - predictably, no doubt - Ezergailis has been attacked from the ethno-fringes, not just the book but the man.  One broadside comes from the ultra-nationalist Latvian right, largely found in the ranks of emigré communities in North America.  These non-scholarly assaults accuse Ezergailis of being a KGB agent out to heap unjust blame on Latvians for their role in killing or helping to kill Jews.  According to these detractors, Ezergailis has made criminals out of Latvian victims.  Another category of emotional criticism comes from the ranks of Jewish survivors who attack Ezergailis and his book for soft-pedalling and whitewashing Latvian responsibility for the Holocaust in the country.  In this case, he is taken to task for underestimating Latvian collaboration.  One such strident voice is that of Professor Gertrude Schneider, herself a German-Jewish survivor of the Riga Ghetto and author twenty years ago of a very unsatisfactory (to say the least) book on the same subject.  Obviously, no scholar can please and appease both camps who regard him as the enemy of "truth."

Until new information is forthcoming, Ezergailis' monograph stands as the most authoritative study to date, a testimony to solid and objective research by a scholar who bravely harbors no ethnocentric agenda other than his goal to write good history as accurately as the evidence permits.  His critics are not that at all, but disgruntled prejudiced detractors lacking concrete evidence.  We urge our readers to read this book with an open mind and, if they disagree, to participate in discourse of painful issues, not resorting to decibel counts and relying on ad hominems, but to look at the hard evidence and allow it to dictate their conclusions.

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